Personally, I don't like his writing style. However, I have friends who roll on the floor in fits of laughter when reading... since the book is essentially (rather base) humor, not information (since you can pull the information from a lot of places), only buy it if you know you like the way he writes!
Maybe in a few years when you can't pull this nfo from all over the place, and it's fallen out of the public consciousness, it could do with a more informative rewrite.
Mr Tesla himself had the same idea, on a grander scale. He wanted to charge the entire ionosphere and use his pretty coils as grounding stations to 'download' power wherever it was needed. A little crazy, perhaps, but a very cool idea!
Not quite correct, unfortunately. Due to the way the different algorithms work, they all work to different levels of efficiency at different bit rates. I once saw a comparison of four MP3 encoders where each one gave the best sound at a different bit rate (tested at 64, 128, 192 and 256kbps).
Therefore, there are liable to be very great differences at higher bit rates. I know I prefer WMA at 64kbps and MP3 at higher bit rates, for instance (WMA gives better midrange at low bitrates but always has severe phasing, even at the higher bitrates)
Most of the research showing ecstasy to be harmful to the brain is severly flawed. That's not to say it ISN'T harmful, just that it hasn't been proved to be yet. The wonderful pictures of 'Your Brain On Drugs' featured prominently in the media and gov't campaigns? FUD, pure and simple. For several reasons... reply if you want more info.
From personal experience, I have many friends aged between 18 and 40 who have been taking E for between 2 and 22 years, with no apparent ill effects to health or wealth. OTOH I have good friends severly ill due to alcohol & tobacco, and some suffering psychological problems due to speed & coke...
No, it's still possible to binary-patch programs - but it's damned hard, near impossible to do anything complex, unless you first partially reverse-engineer the software. Sure, if you've access to the FTP you can change what bytes you like, but figuring out what to change in a multi-meg program with no source could take a very, very long time. I used to patch around old shareware using a hex editor, but I couldn't manage it with anything over a meg or so, or most Windows programs (GUI adds a whole lot more junk code to work with)...
Sorry... either he's lying, or the ducks died from something else randomly. Ducks don't rely on surface tension, they have natural bouyancy which is far greater in force than surface tension. In fact, removing surface tension would make it easier for them to swim, as since they break the surface of the water when swimming surface tension slows them down...
It's impossible for a.1W bulb to give out that much light, however, a 1-3W bulb could (different estimates put the actual visible light output at different levels).
Assuming a 100W filament bulb gives off 2W of useful light, you'd need 20LED's to directly replace it. However: if you used a reading light (one hung over your head, about 50cm from the page, with a reflector to focus the light) then you would only want a fifth to a tenth of the power - so 2 or 4 LEDS would be fine.
The final thing to consider is that and LED will last a lot longer than a filament bulb, so although it may cost $4 or so to build a 'bulb' for your reading lamp, you will probably replace it after *years* of continuous use - or decades of use only in the evenings, as opposed to a year or so of use for a filament bulb.
Most of the spam I get still has opt-out links in it that work, and the bits that don't are relatively repetitive and therefore easy enough to filter out.
And I have never, ever got more spame by clicking an optout link. Either it works, or it doesn't.
There are very few DVD's where the actual *movie* is over 4.7Gb (although I know there are some). So while it may be a little more complex, you can always rip the DVD, burn back just the movie and basic menus to the disc (leaving out the extras) and then fit it on the DVD-R's. Also gives a reason for being cheaper... "See, none of that 'extras' crap, luv. just the movie. Keeps costs down, see? $15 or three for $30, can't say fairer than that" As a side-note, screeners (AKA timecodes) are also usually just the movie and therefore smaller.
And a 30,000% markup on drugs? That means that the drug trade in, say, brazil would have to be worth only $100,000 for a $6 billion trade in the US! (allowing for a total 100% markup by the dealer network outside of the cartels, which is probably a bit low). Oh, and don't forget that the government usually thinks street price is about double the average true street price, so they would claim that as a $12 billion market. Crazy numbers, as I somehow think brazil makes more than that out of cannabis alone in a year...
Signal propogation delay is NOT limited by the speed of light, it is limited by electron drift speed in the wires. That's why completely optical systems are only inherently faster once gate delay is less than signal propogation delay...
my favourite trick is to drop the speed of a processor. I first did this for a customer in India, where the temp was over 50 Celcius ambient, but in testing I discovered that in ambient temperatures below 25 Celcius, it would run fine with only passive cooling (Athlon 800 clocked at 600). Still works today - if my fans ever fail, I simply downclock and carry on regardless. Downlclocking allows you to run stably at lower core voltages, too, increasing the life of the chip still further.
Yeah, but still, why not put a decent TV-out on - component connectors on a flying lead wouldn't add much to the price but would massively increase the quality of TV-out. It can't be that expensive, you can get standalone DVD players for $150 with component out these days, all you'd need to do would be overlay the sync signal on the Y channel from the RGB (I think).
Caffeine is truly addictive, but gaming gets in the way of caffeine addiction! I mean, seriously - can you drink more while coding or while fragging?
Yes, your brain does get screwed up enough when you are lacking in sleep that you get high! Just try staying awake (deliberately) for 3-4 nights, while maintaining normal activity levels. Gets like a bad acid trip after a while! I suppose you could become addicted to it.
Personally, I'd add alcohol to the list - consumed in great quantites at my LAN parties, and very addictive. Oh, and cigarettes. Oh, and X. And various other substances. Or does everwhere other than britain stick to caffeine?!
Seriously: is it necessary to hear when every new tech company that either a) had a bad business model or b) couldn't adjust to a change in markets, dies? It's just business!
No, this isn't a troll - I really do feel it's getting a bit OTT. Businesses die and start up the whole time, very few last that long, especially in a new and fast-changing market. It's often in fact more efficient to close one business and open a new one (rather than majorly change a business model) to respond to a large change in market conditions.
If there was something pertinent hidden deep in the text, my apologies - my german is by no means fantastic these days and I don't trust babelfish that well!
This is only an interface, remember: The base commands sent to the OS can still be the same. So all you need is one similar point, such as the much-loved command prompt. This allows an engineer to say "open your command prompt and type..." followed by a standard commandset. Or even login from afar and perform the same ops from his own preferred interface!
Just to add a little to the 'how big are molecules' discussion... I have here a 1m by 5mm length of copper which is ONE copper crystal. That's one motherfuckin' big molecule.
As to whether metal crystals are molecules... leave it to the damned philosophers!
There is, however, an easy way to get around the minimum wage laws (at least in the UK): Pay for a single *job* (ie $10 to sweep the lot) rather than per hour, and call it 'subcontracting'.
Then, it's up to the subcontractor to make sure his/her employees get NMW, which is in other words the old bloke who doesn't care. Hence, labour for less than NMW...
PalmPilot:
*13 million units sold
*2 people with problems
*Class-action lawsuit
Windows:
*1 unit sold per home PC (on average)
*approx. 1 crash per week on average purely caused by Windows
*No comeback
WTF is going on here? It really is about time someone saw sense on these kind of issues, software companies can release whatever they like and we have no call on them - if only a tiny percentage of users have problems with hardware, they start a class-action lawsuit!
Ummmm...
No.
Wrong.
The pain of childbirth was an evil cast on Eve by God for her sins, not menstruation. Also, your need to work for a living was cst on Adam at the same time, so why do you crow about your job title at the end of every post? Surely you should also be ashamed of your need to work? Or are you not a Christian, but something else?
Origianl sin caused our problems, but the problems themselves aren't sins. As a quick acid test: What's your opinion on sex? Beg:
Re:Useful-For the geek factor--(Think Wireless!)
on
DSLBlaster?
·
· Score: 1
Technically this is a bit illegal, but you could stuff the mini-radios and just set up a bog standard FM transmitter running at the top of the standard radio frequencies, and a reciever in the car, and use that instead. Noone could tell if you used a low-power transmitter that only went a short way...
Alternatively if you can get LOS between your car window and a window near the computer, use and IR setup - much faster and in many ways easier.
Aha! 3rd idea! Just buy a set of wireless headphones and use the reciever out of them to feed directly in. The reproduction is almost perfect on drift-compensated sets and you can buy them for about £30 in the UK now. Beg:
This article is about the new combination of two older technologies rather than a totally new idea. FPGAs and GAs have been around for a good while, but combining them sucessfully is what makes this interesting.
If the control system is properly programmed, then the chips cannot 'crash' and spiral into uselessness since the control system will go back a step unless the new system is better than the old one.
It is very possible for computers programmed using evolutionary techniques to do things that you don't understand how. It's what is known as an irreducible system - the interactions are so complex that after a few generations you cannot trace the changes back by looking at the finished product, you need a log of the evolution. For a full genetic program, this log could be 20,000 or more generations of 100 or more programs being tested - and that's a lot of log to go through to figure out why & how it works!
And as for the reliability issues - you don't run these things 'hot' in critical situations! You run them in simulation, throw problems at them and they create every neat solutions. You then take these solutions and combine them to make a very neat, very normal computer program which can be added to and debugged in the normal way. In terms of FPGAs you would use small, tested circuits to control parts of a critical system like any other small circuit.
These thing aren't meant to be used 'on the fly' - it takes a lot of processing time! They're used to create highly efficient normal circuits which can then be used in normal circuitry.
How long for all these 'developing technologies' to hit our shelves? And how long till transistor based systems start to run out of steam?
Personally, I think the major advances will happen once companies such as Intel begin to hit fundemental barriers in creating silicone chips. Then we'll see some real money being thrown at optical and quantum computing, by companies who work by results rather than by scientific interest.
This is kind of an informed guess, but:
- 7 to 10 years: Silicone begins to run out of steam
- 15 years: First useful optical computers
- 20 to 25 years: Silicone is gone, optical is mainstream
- 50 years: Quantum computers do something useful for the first time
- 75 years: Quantum computers begin to be used by large companies
- 100 years: Quantum computing is mainstream
Hopefully, I'll be around to see all of the above!
Anyone else care to reply with their own timescale?
Slashdot Mirror
A faster Xbox (ie a PC in a pretty box) with emulator software so it can 'be' every game console or gaming machine out there...
Personally, I don't like his writing style. However, I have friends who roll on the floor in fits of laughter when reading... since the book is essentially (rather base) humor, not information (since you can pull the information from a lot of places), only buy it if you know you like the way he writes!
Maybe in a few years when you can't pull this nfo from all over the place, and it's fallen out of the public consciousness, it could do with a more informative rewrite.
Mr Tesla himself had the same idea, on a grander scale. He wanted to charge the entire ionosphere and use his pretty coils as grounding stations to 'download' power wherever it was needed. A little crazy, perhaps, but a very cool idea!
Not quite correct, unfortunately. Due to the way the different algorithms work, they all work to different levels of efficiency at different bit rates. I once saw a comparison of four MP3 encoders where each one gave the best sound at a different bit rate (tested at 64, 128, 192 and 256kbps).
Therefore, there are liable to be very great differences at higher bit rates. I know I prefer WMA at 64kbps and MP3 at higher bit rates, for instance (WMA gives better midrange at low bitrates but always has severe phasing, even at the higher bitrates)
Most of the research showing ecstasy to be harmful to the brain is severly flawed. That's not to say it ISN'T harmful, just that it hasn't been proved to be yet. The wonderful pictures of 'Your Brain On Drugs' featured prominently in the media and gov't campaigns? FUD, pure and simple. For several reasons... reply if you want more info.
From personal experience, I have many friends aged between 18 and 40 who have been taking E for between 2 and 22 years, with no apparent ill effects to health or wealth. OTOH I have good friends severly ill due to alcohol & tobacco, and some suffering psychological problems due to speed & coke...
No, it's still possible to binary-patch programs - but it's damned hard, near impossible to do anything complex, unless you first partially reverse-engineer the software. Sure, if you've access to the FTP you can change what bytes you like, but figuring out what to change in a multi-meg program with no source could take a very, very long time. I used to patch around old shareware using a hex editor, but I couldn't manage it with anything over a meg or so, or most Windows programs (GUI adds a whole lot more junk code to work with)...
Sorry... either he's lying, or the ducks died from something else randomly. Ducks don't rely on surface tension, they have natural bouyancy which is far greater in force than surface tension. In fact, removing surface tension would make it easier for them to swim, as since they break the surface of the water when swimming surface tension slows them down...
It's impossible for a .1W bulb to give out that much light, however, a 1-3W bulb could (different estimates put the actual visible light output at different levels).
Assuming a 100W filament bulb gives off 2W of useful light, you'd need 20LED's to directly replace it. However: if you used a reading light (one hung over your head, about 50cm from the page, with a reflector to focus the light) then you would only want a fifth to a tenth of the power - so 2 or 4 LEDS would be fine.
The final thing to consider is that and LED will last a lot longer than a filament bulb, so although it may cost $4 or so to build a 'bulb' for your reading lamp, you will probably replace it after *years* of continuous use - or decades of use only in the evenings, as opposed to a year or so of use for a filament bulb.
Most of the spam I get still has opt-out links in it that work, and the bits that don't are relatively repetitive and therefore easy enough to filter out.
And I have never, ever got more spame by clicking an optout link. Either it works, or it doesn't.
JJ
There are very few DVD's where the actual *movie* is over 4.7Gb (although I know there are some). So while it may be a little more complex, you can always rip the DVD, burn back just the movie and basic menus to the disc (leaving out the extras) and then fit it on the DVD-R's. Also gives a reason for being cheaper... "See, none of that 'extras' crap, luv. just the movie. Keeps costs down, see? $15 or three for $30, can't say fairer than that"
As a side-note, screeners (AKA timecodes) are also usually just the movie and therefore smaller.
And a 30,000% markup on drugs? That means that the drug trade in, say, brazil would have to be worth only $100,000
for a $6 billion trade in the US! (allowing for a total 100% markup by the dealer network outside of the cartels, which is probably a bit low). Oh, and don't forget that the government usually thinks street price is about double the average true street price, so they would claim that as a $12 billion market. Crazy numbers, as I somehow think brazil makes more than that out of cannabis alone in a year...
Signal propogation delay is NOT limited by the speed of light, it is limited by electron drift speed in the wires. That's why completely optical systems are only inherently faster once gate delay is less than signal propogation delay...
my favourite trick is to drop the speed of a processor. I first did this for a customer in India, where the temp was over 50 Celcius ambient, but in testing I discovered that in ambient temperatures below 25 Celcius, it would run fine with only passive cooling (Athlon 800 clocked at 600). Still works today - if my fans ever fail, I simply downclock and carry on regardless. Downlclocking allows you to run stably at lower core voltages, too, increasing the life of the chip still further.
As the saying goes, 'everyone does it differently'... rarely does one person's idea of l33t match anothers.
Yeah, but still, why not put a decent TV-out on - component connectors on a flying lead wouldn't add much to the price but would massively increase the quality of TV-out. It can't be that expensive, you can get standalone DVD players for $150 with component out these days, all you'd need to do would be overlay the sync signal on the Y channel from the RGB (I think).
Yes, your brain does get screwed up enough when you are lacking in sleep that you get high! Just try staying awake (deliberately) for 3-4 nights, while maintaining normal activity levels. Gets like a bad acid trip after a while! I suppose you could become addicted to it.
Personally, I'd add alcohol to the list - consumed in great quantites at my LAN parties, and very addictive. Oh, and cigarettes. Oh, and X. And various other substances. Or does everwhere other than britain stick to caffeine?!
Seriously: is it necessary to hear when every new tech company that either a) had a bad business model or b) couldn't adjust to a change in markets, dies? It's just business!
No, this isn't a troll - I really do feel it's getting a bit OTT. Businesses die and start up the whole time, very few last that long, especially in a new and fast-changing market. It's often in fact more efficient to close one business and open a new one (rather than majorly change a business model) to respond to a large change in market conditions.
If there was something pertinent hidden deep in the text, my apologies - my german is by no means fantastic these days and I don't trust babelfish that well!
Just to add a little to the 'how big are molecules' discussion... I have here a 1m by 5mm length of copper which is ONE copper crystal. That's one motherfuckin' big molecule.
As to whether metal crystals are molecules... leave it to the damned philosophers!
There is, however, an easy way to get around the minimum wage laws (at least in the UK): Pay for a single *job* (ie $10 to sweep the lot) rather than per hour, and call it 'subcontracting'.
Then, it's up to the subcontractor to make sure his/her employees get NMW, which is in other words the old bloke who doesn't care. Hence, labour for less than NMW...
PalmPilot:
*13 million units sold
*2 people with problems
*Class-action lawsuit
Windows:
*1 unit sold per home PC (on average)
*approx. 1 crash per week on average purely caused by Windows
*No comeback
WTF is going on here? It really is about time someone saw sense on these kind of issues, software companies can release whatever they like and we have no call on them - if only a tiny percentage of users have problems with hardware, they start a class-action lawsuit!
I don't think a VooDoo 3500 comes under the heading of 'current generation' 3D tech, I'm afraid. They're about 3-4 generations behind now...
Ummmm... No. Wrong. The pain of childbirth was an evil cast on Eve by God for her sins, not menstruation. Also, your need to work for a living was cst on Adam at the same time, so why do you crow about your job title at the end of every post? Surely you should also be ashamed of your need to work? Or are you not a Christian, but something else? Origianl sin caused our problems, but the problems themselves aren't sins. As a quick acid test: What's your opinion on sex?
Beg:
Technically this is a bit illegal, but you could stuff the mini-radios and just set up a bog standard FM transmitter running at the top of the standard radio frequencies, and a reciever in the car, and use that instead. Noone could tell if you used a low-power transmitter that only went a short way... Alternatively if you can get LOS between your car window and a window near the computer, use and IR setup - much faster and in many ways easier. Aha! 3rd idea! Just buy a set of wireless headphones and use the reciever out of them to feed directly in. The reproduction is almost perfect on drift-compensated sets and you can buy them for about £30 in the UK now.
Beg:
If the control system is properly programmed, then the chips cannot 'crash' and spiral into uselessness since the control system will go back a step unless the new system is better than the old one.
It is very possible for computers programmed using evolutionary techniques to do things that you don't understand how. It's what is known as an irreducible system - the interactions are so complex that after a few generations you cannot trace the changes back by looking at the finished product, you need a log of the evolution. For a full genetic program, this log could be 20,000 or more generations of 100 or more programs being tested - and that's a lot of log to go through to figure out why & how it works!
And as for the reliability issues - you don't run these things 'hot' in critical situations! You run them in simulation, throw problems at them and they create every neat solutions. You then take these solutions and combine them to make a very neat, very normal computer program which can be added to and debugged in the normal way. In terms of FPGAs you would use small, tested circuits to control parts of a critical system like any other small circuit.
These thing aren't meant to be used 'on the fly' - it takes a lot of processing time! They're used to create highly efficient normal circuits which can then be used in normal circuitry.
Beg:
Personally, I think the major advances will happen once companies such as Intel begin to hit fundemental barriers in creating silicone chips. Then we'll see some real money being thrown at optical and quantum computing, by companies who work by results rather than by scientific interest.
This is kind of an informed guess, but:
- 7 to 10 years: Silicone begins to run out of steam
- 15 years: First useful optical computers
- 20 to 25 years: Silicone is gone, optical is mainstream
- 50 years: Quantum computers do something useful for the first time
- 75 years: Quantum computers begin to be used by large companies
- 100 years: Quantum computing is mainstream
Hopefully, I'll be around to see all of the above!
Anyone else care to reply with their own timescale?
Beg: