Hmmm... Probably the Indexing service in Windows sends all of your private information to Bill Gates, who has one thousand enormous mainframe computers processing that data at 10000000 teraflops and generating an enormous index of all information known to man. Then, when you type in a search, it sends a query, and all the mainframes blow up from overheating.
He says Tiger isn't that big of an upgrade, except for Spotlight and Dashboard... Bah! Mac OS X ROCKS and Windows SUCKS!!!
Just kidding. What I would like to add to this discussion is the following: The Apple web site claims there are 200 new features, as I understand it. And there are a hundred different ways you can navigate this site. If you want to use the word "Web Site", then Apple is the best example, as it truly is a web, and it's difficult to find the way around it.
Anyway, so I was on the Apple site trying to figure out what these 200 new features are that they're worth over 100 dollars to buy, and other than the ten features (automator, spotlight, dashboard, mail 2, ichat, and all those things), I couldn't for the life of me, find out what the other 190 new features are. What are they, 190 bug fixes deep in the code somewhere? 190 lines in total throughout the Darwin code that were modified in some way? A new function that is 190 lines long? Or are there really a bunch of new features that simply aren't wiz-bang enough for Apple to waste time listing them? I'd really like to know, because:
Spotlight will certainly make a lot of things better; Automator is something I'll probably use a lot. Dashboard is something I would bring up to impress my friends. But under all that, I use UNIX most of the time, and I spend most of my Mac-usage-time using their busted-ass X Window server that isn't quite that well integrated into the user interface, or in a Terminal window, or in Xcode, or something like that. So where the heck are the other 190 features at?
Here at Harvard, we do not end our sentences with a preposition.
Ok, where the heck are the other 190 features at, asshole?
You know, I don't think there is any social contract between a web site maker and me. If there is information that I need on that site, I would rather read it without all kinds of annoying things jumping out all over the place, taking forever to download, sticking spyware all over my computer, and otherwise screwing things up. I have much better things to do with my day, and I don't usually click on ads anyway, or buy products that are advertised in this way.
What I do click on are those text ads that Google places on the side of its page. This is actually a convenience for web browsing. First of all, it stays out of the way, doesn't take any time to download, provides useful information, and leads folks to products and services that might actually be useful.
Therefore, I am saying that I have no problem with web site owners making money off their creation, but please do it in a way that is comfortable for the readers, too.
...Chinese citizens seeking access to Web sites containing content related to Taiwanese and Tibetan independence, Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen Square incident, opposition political parties, or a variety of anti-Communist movements will frequently find themselves blocked...
What about the thousands of Chinese officials who have to read all this stuff and then censor it? Who censors them? How do you know that they don't, deep down inside, feel that what they're doing is wrong, and therefore that they don't go and secretly disseminate censored information to their friends and colleagues? How do you know that the very people censoring the information aren't the very people involved in generating it? Look at all the problems created by censorship for an entire nation, especially one as big as China, with regards to physical size and population.
It would be so much better if China wouldn't censor all this crap. Sure, their retarded Communist government will fall apart within a decade, but so what? A Republic that is based on human freedom is going to be so much better for the world, not only because individuals will enjoy more freedoms, but also because the Chinese currency will become subject to the same market forces as other currencies around the world, which will increase the Chinese standard of living to a significantly higher level than it currently is.
Viacom executives are considering the proposal, despite another branch of Paramount saying the cancellation was final just a few days ago.
Maybe they were planning to cancel it here, aire it in Canada, and they thought we'd never find out about it. Heh heh heh... Thanks to Slashdot, their evil scheme was foiled! I'll get you next time, Gadget, next time!!!
Hmmm... This must be GNU tar with a talking-paperclip interface... or actually, maybe they'll use a talking hard drive. And the program, I'd bet, is requires 500 megs of hard disk space for compact installation, and a gig of RAM to execute.
Yup. Sounds like Microsoft. Where do you want to go today?
The answer to all the virus, spyware, spam, scamware, popups, and other malicious code, is not to try and block this protocol and then realize it can come in through that protocol; then block that protocol and realize that doing so is extremely complicated and creates other networks, while the stuff gets in through floppy disks, and then block those and realize it gets in through certain websites, and then, and then, and then...
The solution is to use all those wonderful features that modern operating systems have, such as permissions (old school) and ACLs (shiny and new) to prevent the ability of malicious code to function in the first place.
Intel today announced its new microprocessor architecture technology. Named the Shiitakeum, Intel's new processor boasts twelve powerful processing cores and new technologies which will enable content providers to deliver compelling enterprise solutions.
The Shiitakeum has the following new features:
* Four 1024-bit (1 kilobit) digital processing cores.
* Two 1024-photon (1 kilophoton) frozen light cores.
* Two 1024-qubit (1 kiloqubit) quantum computing cores.
* Four 1024-channel (1 kilochannel) analog computing cores.
* SingleAtom technology squeezes one thousand transistors into a single atom.
* The processing pipeline has been broken down into 299,792,458 discreet steps, enabling Intel to remove the internal clock altogether and run the digital portion of the processor at the speed of light. One "cycle" represents the absolute cosmic measure unit of time, and all operations occur in one cycle.
* 24,856 new instructions have been added since the previous model, bringing the new total to over 72 trillion instructions. This VCISC (very complex instruction set) is processed into a macrocode consisting of approximately 4 million instructions, which is further processed into a microcode consisting of of 1200 instructions. * New instructions can be downloaded into the microcode or macrocode portion of the processor via design tools similar to old fashioned FPGA design tools. As a result, the entire UNIX operating system can be programmed in one instruction!
* RAM has been depreciated. 32 exabytes of internal general-use registers allow software to make more efficient data access, providing a more compelling Internet experience.
Firefox is a really nice browser, and I deeply appreciate what the Firefox folks have done for all of us. However, I currently continue to use the closed-source, proprietary browser that is Opera, mainly because it is a lot more efficient at certain things than Firefox:
Most important to me, once a page is loaded, accessing it is instant in Opera. Say you click on several links. You can go "back" any number of pages and each one instantly appears, without reloading or any of that inconvenient stuff. No other browser currently does this, whether it be Firefox, Safari on OS X, or anything else I've tried. Opera is the only one, and incidentally, I use this a lot. Once you get used to a feature like this, it is extremely difficult to switch browsers, no matter what the advantages of the other product.
Also, I like the keys you can push in Opera. "z" takes you "back", "x" takes you "forward"... This is a lot easier than remembering all those weird key modifiers, alt, meta, option, control, or whatever, with various arrow keys, to go back and forward.
Like I said, it's an efficient browser.
Hubble can be replaced...
on
Hope for Hubble
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
It may not be over yet. space today reports that Bush's NASA administrator nominee, Michael Griffin, wants to revisit the Hubble decision.
Told you Bush is a good president!
(Now I bet I'll be modded -1 Troll or Offtopic or something like that for supporting Bush. But if I were to write a completely inflammatory, trollish, offtopic post about how much Bush lied (Bush did NOT lie, by the way), then I'd be modded +5 Insightful or something like that. Slashdot. What the hell did you expect?)
Now the on-topic part of my post, as a reward for those Republicans out there who are actually reading this: I think that space exploration is a very meaningful industry, as it ultimately causes technologies to emerge which benefit the whole world. Better types of insulation, machining processes, computers, and other great things resulted from past missions to the moon. I think that further exploration has a lot to offer for the future.
They are, however, discussing quite a hefty amount of money to fix Hubble, and I think it would be best if the thing could be replaced by a telescope that is much bigger and better. The cost of repairs would undoubtedly be smaller than the cost of building a whole new telescope, but at least several years down the road, we'd have a telescope that is a lot more capable than the current Hubble.
Who the hell did this survey? The New York Times? I wouldn't be surprised. That liberal organization would like to have no competition for infiltrating our minds with its rubbish, poisoning us with its idealistic and wonderful-sounding schemes that are actually rooted in complete evil, so that it may eventually control the weak-minded world and cause Bush to exit the White House after his current term ends. (Only thing is, nobody informed the New York Times that Bush is going to leave anyway, as there is a limit of two terms per president. But I'm sure the New York Times will take the credit for it.)
Obviously, the above is a lot of rubbish, but you read the whole thing, so it was probably good, wholesome rubbish.
This one should have been published on April 1st. The real April Fools joke would have been that it's completely true, but everyone would have thought that it's a joke. And that, my friends, is what April Fools is all about.
Now if only they could modify this thing to produce papers on selected subjects, using a writing style "learned" by analyzing some of the user's own writing, so that students won't have to waste all their time writing stupid papers, and would have time for more important matters, like actually learning the material, hanging out, drinking booze, and having unsafe sex.
Ha! Finally, hardware manufacturers are discovering the great secret: They're in the business to sell hardware! They're not in the business of producing software drivers for Microsoft.
And guess what? I think this will ultimately increase their sales. As more drivers are available, choosing hardware to run Linux or some obscure OS won't be so difficult, so people will be more likely to buy a piece of hardware.
I think this will also improve the quality of their products. Often, drivers, like any other software, contain bugs, which can cause it to appear as if the hardware isn't working as well as it should. Or perhaps the driver isn't quite as efficient as it could be with system resources, so it seems as if the hardware isn't quite as fast as it should be. When these things are released under open source, it is more likely that things like this will get fixed and improved, and that will ultimately improve the vendor's hardware product without requiring any significant effort on the part of the vendor.
XGI and VIA are doing a smart thing. I'm heading over to write them an email about them and thank them. I suggest that others do the same. This is great news, and I hope other vendors will follow.
Why is Microsoft spending so much to get so few users in Brazil? I'll tell you why: Because they'd rather sell Windows at a huge loss than have any more people switch to Linux. The more people switch, the better Linux ultimately becomes, the more knowledgeable people become about their computers, as Linux is a technical nightmare for newbies, and therefore, the less users will want to use Windows in the future. These people will move around the world, moving to countries outside Brazil, perhaps where Windows is in higher use, and they will tell their friends and neighbors about Linux, and help them use it. They will develop more applications for Linux, reducing the requirement for Windows applications with no counterpart on Linux, or with poor counterparts... Microsoft knows that each time a user switches from Windows to Linux, or simply starts by using Linux in the first place, Microsoft is losing one more granule of sand under its huge concrete foundation, and eventually, their entire campus is going to slip right into the pacific ocean.
And who cares, anyway? The way I see it, Windows won't be a good OS until fifteen years after Microsoft releases all of their code under the GPL. This is because:
When Microsoft releases the code, many people who are currently stuck with Windows being a piece of junk will begin to squash bugs that bother them, add features they need, remove features they don't need, or more specifically, set it up so the OS can be configured in much the same was as you have lots of compile-time options available for installing Linux. However, it will take nearly a decade for most of the OS to be rewritten from the ground-up, taking a lot of factors into consideration that Microsoft could never do, being that it is always in a rush to release the darn thing, chock-full of bugs as it is, to make a profit.
It will take an additional five years or so, once the OS has stabilized and become useful, as well as usable, before it will be made into a first-class product by the open-source community.
The way I see it, the most important use for this code would be to make Wine implement all Windows calls, from DOS all the way through the newest version of Windows, with all kinds of "smart" logic built into Wine that will cause the functions to execute in the most computationally "correct" way possible, emulating only certain bugs for certain applications when it is known that those applications depend on the presence of those bugs.
Otherwise, Windows is useless, and therefore, I don't see Brazil jumping on the Windows bandwagon when they're perfectly happy with Linux.
Time to stop running Windows, which I use under QEMU... XP is too darn slow under QEMU anyway. That's why I'm waiting for Darwine!
I just don't understand why an entire computer's hardware has to be emulated in software, and then the operating system, with all its polling and processing loops, interrupt handling, and background crap that it does, has to be emulated as well.
Darwine is going to eliminate that. It's going to have an application loader, so when you click a Windows.EXE in Mac OS, it will open it in a loader. QEMU will then run the executable, emulating only the processor. All system calls will convert data structures to Mac format and then call Wine functions, which will be compiled natively under Mac OS. I think this will bring about a tremendous speedup, as only the application will be running, and applications spend nearly all of their time just waiting for input, so it won't take hardly any processor resources; and finally, only the program's inner workings will run under emulation. This is exciting!
And screw Windows, SP2 and all... That OS is so full of vulnerabilities and bugs that it's not even funny anymore. Microsoft just patches upon fix forever. Their code probably contains functions 1000 lines long that have indents going so far to the right that they're voting Republican and attacking the Middle East for cheap oil, which keeps going up anyway. (Proof, as much as I hate to admit it, that Bush didn't lie about Iraq, 'cuz if he did, Gas would cost fifty cents a gallon by now. I hate to admit it, but I was wrong about him.)
Perhaps Moore's law really is beginning to run up against its limits, as you will see if you read enough electronics magazines, but what I really don't "get" is this: The Intel processor can do amazing things, but look at the Motorola processors, like the G4s in those Macs... They're faster at floating point and at a variety of other uses. Their instruction set is quite different. There are many other significant differences between the Intel and Motorola processors. And as we know from software, the way an algorithm is made up, or the way it is implemented, can drastically affect the performance. I think processors follow quite the same rules. Maybe it's time, while we're running up against the limits of Moore's law, to examine what software needs to do nowadays, and then design a processor from the ground up that will fulfill each function in the most efficient way possible. And while we're at it, let's go back to the good ol' days of making the software efficient, too. You'd be amazed the kinds of ridiculous things todays' computers can do, but the software is just too darn inefficient.
Reminds me of that prefect from Les Miserables (by Victor Hugo) who wanted to make a census of a small town and find out where each person came from, what their past history was, etc. The main character, the mayor of this town, tried to talk that dude out of it.
The RIAA has announced that it has just passed new legislation that governs the use of the Internet. By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions.
The legislation states that ISPs must advertise their broadband services as providing unlimited Internet access, but that all access above 128 kilobytes of bandwidth used within a year should result in extra charges of $1.00 per byte. A separate clause in the new legislation states that by 2007, all ISPs must have technology in place to track certain bandwidth-eating downloads, such as Internet advertisements, popups, and downloaded spam, over which users have no control, so that the RIAA can charge an additional $5.00 for each byte of these downloads.
"We are excited to bring new freedoms to users around the world," stated RIAA house speaker Darl McBride. "Consumers will be glad to know that they are paying more and receiving less."
A third clause in the legislation outlaws the use of Linux, punishing its users with complete lack of Internet access, enforced by technologies that fingerprint the operating system and deny access if it is not the latest version of Microsoft Windows or SCO UNIX. Also, 14% of Internet fees that will accrue under this legislation will be paid to SCO to compensate for the theft of its valuable intellectual property.
Finally, a spokesperson for the RIAA stated that the RIAA will soon phase out Congress, as it provides parallel services to the people, and is therefore an unnecessary duplication of effort.
Ian suggests a method for averting crisis on his blog."
I've got a method for averting crisis: how 'bout if Debian would actually release something once in a while? I don't mean to sound harsh or mean, but honestly, people don't like waiting until Real Soon Now (tm) for software. They want it now.
I know the Debian folks really want to get Sarge right, but honestly, let's get a move on!
Good at math, are ye? I tell ye, me hearties, I be gooder at math than ye Russians. I even know what comes after three in countin', me hearties, and I can hack a tree stump faster than ye can tell me the difference 'tween the LEA and ADD instructions, and certainly faster than ye can write a 9-cycle convex polygon texture mapper.
Good at math... Bah, humbug.
Apple will do it right.
on
Voom No More
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· Score: 1
What happens next? I bet Apple will come out with a PVR that will do for television what the iPod is doing for music. And then, goodbye ReplayTV.
When they reach the mantle, to all of our surprise, the pressure of the mantle will burst through the crust, similarly to the way the pressure of air inside the stretched rubber of a balloon bursts a big opening in the balloon when a single pin-prick is made. This will create a volcano larger than any which has been observed in past history, resulting in a disaster that will make the 2004 Tsunami look like a splash of dew on the morning grass. Except that instead of fresh, cold seawater, this will be a sulfuric, boiling hot, hellish nightmare the likes of which this world has never seen.
The moral of the story: Don't try to play God, or you'll have an appointment with the devil. Lord save us.
This thing is a whole NEIGHT feet tall?!?!! Damn, I didn't even know there was such a big number. Well heck, I often can't remember what comes after three in countin'. But neight feet tall... That must be pretty big!
They've been talking about this ridiculous space elevator for I don't know how many years. If there are practical reasons for this, such as developing extremely strong wire that is exactly one molecule thick, then I can see why the discussions should continue. But otherwise, what the heck are we wasting all this time on?
Heck, if it could be made into a conductor, that would be cool, because it would allow very thin cables, probably as large as one very thin wire is today, that actually contains hundreds of separate conductors. Think of very thin network cables that can carry an entire 1kb packet in one clock (that's eight thousand wires, plus a few more) in a cable that is no thicker than a modern day Cat-5e.
But honestly, as far as this space elevator is concerned, what exactly is the practical reason that it is discussed so often?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... Probably the Indexing service in Windows sends all of your private information to Bill Gates, who has one thousand enormous mainframe computers processing that data at 10000000 teraflops and generating an enormous index of all information known to man. Then, when you type in a search, it sends a query, and all the mainframes blow up from overheating.
Just kidding. What I would like to add to this discussion is the following: The Apple web site claims there are 200 new features, as I understand it. And there are a hundred different ways you can navigate this site. If you want to use the word "Web Site", then Apple is the best example, as it truly is a web, and it's difficult to find the way around it.
Anyway, so I was on the Apple site trying to figure out what these 200 new features are that they're worth over 100 dollars to buy, and other than the ten features (automator, spotlight, dashboard, mail 2, ichat, and all those things), I couldn't for the life of me, find out what the other 190 new features are. What are they, 190 bug fixes deep in the code somewhere? 190 lines in total throughout the Darwin code that were modified in some way? A new function that is 190 lines long? Or are there really a bunch of new features that simply aren't wiz-bang enough for Apple to waste time listing them? I'd really like to know, because:
Spotlight will certainly make a lot of things better; Automator is something I'll probably use a lot. Dashboard is something I would bring up to impress my friends. But under all that, I use UNIX most of the time, and I spend most of my Mac-usage-time using their busted-ass X Window server that isn't quite that well integrated into the user interface, or in a Terminal window, or in Xcode, or something like that. So where the heck are the other 190 features at?
Ok, where the heck are the other 190 features at, asshole?What I do click on are those text ads that Google places on the side of its page. This is actually a convenience for web browsing. First of all, it stays out of the way, doesn't take any time to download, provides useful information, and leads folks to products and services that might actually be useful.
Therefore, I am saying that I have no problem with web site owners making money off their creation, but please do it in a way that is comfortable for the readers, too.
It would be so much better if China wouldn't censor all this crap. Sure, their retarded Communist government will fall apart within a decade, but so what? A Republic that is based on human freedom is going to be so much better for the world, not only because individuals will enjoy more freedoms, but also because the Chinese currency will become subject to the same market forces as other currencies around the world, which will increase the Chinese standard of living to a significantly higher level than it currently is.
Maybe they were planning to cancel it here, aire it in Canada, and they thought we'd never find out about it. Heh heh heh... Thanks to Slashdot, their evil scheme was foiled! I'll get you next time, Gadget, next time!!!
Yup. Sounds like Microsoft. Where do you want to go today?
The solution is to use all those wonderful features that modern operating systems have, such as permissions (old school) and ACLs (shiny and new) to prevent the ability of malicious code to function in the first place.
The Shiitakeum has the following new features:
* Four 1024-bit (1 kilobit) digital processing cores.
* Two 1024-photon (1 kilophoton) frozen light cores.
* Two 1024-qubit (1 kiloqubit) quantum computing cores.
* Four 1024-channel (1 kilochannel) analog computing cores.
* SingleAtom technology squeezes one thousand transistors into a single atom.
* The processing pipeline has been broken down into 299,792,458 discreet steps, enabling Intel to remove the internal clock altogether and run the digital portion of the processor at the speed of light. One "cycle" represents the absolute cosmic measure unit of time, and all operations occur in one cycle.
* 24,856 new instructions have been added since the previous model, bringing the new total to over 72 trillion instructions. This VCISC (very complex instruction set) is processed into a macrocode consisting of approximately 4 million instructions, which is further processed into a microcode consisting of of 1200 instructions.
* New instructions can be downloaded into the microcode or macrocode portion of the processor via design tools similar to old fashioned FPGA design tools. As a result, the entire UNIX operating system can be programmed in one instruction!
* RAM has been depreciated. 32 exabytes of internal general-use registers allow software to make more efficient data access, providing a more compelling Internet experience.
These are exciting times.
Most important to me, once a page is loaded, accessing it is instant in Opera. Say you click on several links. You can go "back" any number of pages and each one instantly appears, without reloading or any of that inconvenient stuff. No other browser currently does this, whether it be Firefox, Safari on OS X, or anything else I've tried. Opera is the only one, and incidentally, I use this a lot. Once you get used to a feature like this, it is extremely difficult to switch browsers, no matter what the advantages of the other product.
Also, I like the keys you can push in Opera. "z" takes you "back", "x" takes you "forward"... This is a lot easier than remembering all those weird key modifiers, alt, meta, option, control, or whatever, with various arrow keys, to go back and forward.
Like I said, it's an efficient browser.
Told you Bush is a good president!
(Now I bet I'll be modded -1 Troll or Offtopic or something like that for supporting Bush. But if I were to write a completely inflammatory, trollish, offtopic post about how much Bush lied (Bush did NOT lie, by the way), then I'd be modded +5 Insightful or something like that. Slashdot. What the hell did you expect?)
Now the on-topic part of my post, as a reward for those Republicans out there who are actually reading this: I think that space exploration is a very meaningful industry, as it ultimately causes technologies to emerge which benefit the whole world. Better types of insulation, machining processes, computers, and other great things resulted from past missions to the moon. I think that further exploration has a lot to offer for the future.
They are, however, discussing quite a hefty amount of money to fix Hubble, and I think it would be best if the thing could be replaced by a telescope that is much bigger and better. The cost of repairs would undoubtedly be smaller than the cost of building a whole new telescope, but at least several years down the road, we'd have a telescope that is a lot more capable than the current Hubble.
Obviously, the above is a lot of rubbish, but you read the whole thing, so it was probably good, wholesome rubbish.
Now if only they could modify this thing to produce papers on selected subjects, using a writing style "learned" by analyzing some of the user's own writing, so that students won't have to waste all their time writing stupid papers, and would have time for more important matters, like actually learning the material, hanging out, drinking booze, and having unsafe sex.
And guess what? I think this will ultimately increase their sales. As more drivers are available, choosing hardware to run Linux or some obscure OS won't be so difficult, so people will be more likely to buy a piece of hardware.
I think this will also improve the quality of their products. Often, drivers, like any other software, contain bugs, which can cause it to appear as if the hardware isn't working as well as it should. Or perhaps the driver isn't quite as efficient as it could be with system resources, so it seems as if the hardware isn't quite as fast as it should be. When these things are released under open source, it is more likely that things like this will get fixed and improved, and that will ultimately improve the vendor's hardware product without requiring any significant effort on the part of the vendor.
XGI and VIA are doing a smart thing. I'm heading over to write them an email about them and thank them. I suggest that others do the same. This is great news, and I hope other vendors will follow.
And who cares, anyway? The way I see it, Windows won't be a good OS until fifteen years after Microsoft releases all of their code under the GPL. This is because:
When Microsoft releases the code, many people who are currently stuck with Windows being a piece of junk will begin to squash bugs that bother them, add features they need, remove features they don't need, or more specifically, set it up so the OS can be configured in much the same was as you have lots of compile-time options available for installing Linux. However, it will take nearly a decade for most of the OS to be rewritten from the ground-up, taking a lot of factors into consideration that Microsoft could never do, being that it is always in a rush to release the darn thing, chock-full of bugs as it is, to make a profit.
It will take an additional five years or so, once the OS has stabilized and become useful, as well as usable, before it will be made into a first-class product by the open-source community.
The way I see it, the most important use for this code would be to make Wine implement all Windows calls, from DOS all the way through the newest version of Windows, with all kinds of "smart" logic built into Wine that will cause the functions to execute in the most computationally "correct" way possible, emulating only certain bugs for certain applications when it is known that those applications depend on the presence of those bugs.
Otherwise, Windows is useless, and therefore, I don't see Brazil jumping on the Windows bandwagon when they're perfectly happy with Linux.
I just don't understand why an entire computer's hardware has to be emulated in software, and then the operating system, with all its polling and processing loops, interrupt handling, and background crap that it does, has to be emulated as well.
Darwine is going to eliminate that. It's going to have an application loader, so when you click a Windows .EXE in Mac OS, it will open it in a loader. QEMU will then run the executable, emulating only the processor. All system calls will convert data structures to Mac format and then call Wine functions, which will be compiled natively under Mac OS. I think this will bring about a tremendous speedup, as only the application will be running, and applications spend nearly all of their time just waiting for input, so it won't take hardly any processor resources; and finally, only the program's inner workings will run under emulation. This is exciting!
And screw Windows, SP2 and all... That OS is so full of vulnerabilities and bugs that it's not even funny anymore. Microsoft just patches upon fix forever. Their code probably contains functions 1000 lines long that have indents going so far to the right that they're voting Republican and attacking the Middle East for cheap oil, which keeps going up anyway. (Proof, as much as I hate to admit it, that Bush didn't lie about Iraq, 'cuz if he did, Gas would cost fifty cents a gallon by now. I hate to admit it, but I was wrong about him.)
Yeah. Windows sucks.
Perhaps Moore's law really is beginning to run up against its limits, as you will see if you read enough electronics magazines, but what I really don't "get" is this: The Intel processor can do amazing things, but look at the Motorola processors, like the G4s in those Macs... They're faster at floating point and at a variety of other uses. Their instruction set is quite different. There are many other significant differences between the Intel and Motorola processors. And as we know from software, the way an algorithm is made up, or the way it is implemented, can drastically affect the performance. I think processors follow quite the same rules. Maybe it's time, while we're running up against the limits of Moore's law, to examine what software needs to do nowadays, and then design a processor from the ground up that will fulfill each function in the most efficient way possible. And while we're at it, let's go back to the good ol' days of making the software efficient, too. You'd be amazed the kinds of ridiculous things todays' computers can do, but the software is just too darn inefficient.
Reminds me of that prefect from Les Miserables (by Victor Hugo) who wanted to make a census of a small town and find out where each person came from, what their past history was, etc. The main character, the mayor of this town, tried to talk that dude out of it.
The RIAA has announced that it has just passed new legislation that governs the use of the Internet. By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions.
The legislation states that ISPs must advertise their broadband services as providing unlimited Internet access, but that all access above 128 kilobytes of bandwidth used within a year should result in extra charges of $1.00 per byte. A separate clause in the new legislation states that by 2007, all ISPs must have technology in place to track certain bandwidth-eating downloads, such as Internet advertisements, popups, and downloaded spam, over which users have no control, so that the RIAA can charge an additional $5.00 for each byte of these downloads.
"We are excited to bring new freedoms to users around the world," stated RIAA house speaker Darl McBride. "Consumers will be glad to know that they are paying more and receiving less."
A third clause in the legislation outlaws the use of Linux, punishing its users with complete lack of Internet access, enforced by technologies that fingerprint the operating system and deny access if it is not the latest version of Microsoft Windows or SCO UNIX. Also, 14% of Internet fees that will accrue under this legislation will be paid to SCO to compensate for the theft of its valuable intellectual property.
Finally, a spokesperson for the RIAA stated that the RIAA will soon phase out Congress, as it provides parallel services to the people, and is therefore an unnecessary duplication of effort.
I've got a method for averting crisis: how 'bout if Debian would actually release something once in a while? I don't mean to sound harsh or mean, but honestly, people don't like waiting until Real Soon Now (tm) for software. They want it now.
I know the Debian folks really want to get Sarge right, but honestly, let's get a move on!
Bah! Real Programmers (tm) don't use version control and code without breaking the software! Ba hahahaha hahaha haha!
Good at math... Bah, humbug.
What happens next? I bet Apple will come out with a PVR that will do for television what the iPod is doing for music. And then, goodbye ReplayTV.
The moral of the story: Don't try to play God, or you'll have an appointment with the devil. Lord save us.
This thing is a whole NEIGHT feet tall?!?!! Damn, I didn't even know there was such a big number. Well heck, I often can't remember what comes after three in countin'. But neight feet tall... That must be pretty big!
Heck, if it could be made into a conductor, that would be cool, because it would allow very thin cables, probably as large as one very thin wire is today, that actually contains hundreds of separate conductors. Think of very thin network cables that can carry an entire 1kb packet in one clock (that's eight thousand wires, plus a few more) in a cable that is no thicker than a modern day Cat-5e.
But honestly, as far as this space elevator is concerned, what exactly is the practical reason that it is discussed so often?