And from other comments, it appears as though many libraries already use that policy. An onymous borrowing is totally unnecessary.
I've never worked at a library that kept the records for long. But most books aren't checked out very often. Sensitive books are mostly read in the library so your record could easily be kept for 10-15 years even if they only keep a record of the last person that checked out the book. I shelved Mien Kampf every 6 months or so but it hadn't been checked out in years. I was only one page out of 4 in the branch so it was read every 6 weeks or so.
They kept the last person checking out the book in case it was reported damaged by the next patron. Of course an expiration date on that would have made sense since you can't claim someone who had the book two years ago damaged it. But libraries subsist on donations and usually a stipend for salaries, and sometimes building maintenance. Large city libraries purchase books, but them smaller ones rent them or get the donated. If you ever checked out a book with a green label it was probably rented. Sometimes this is just the new fiction.
Unless it's a large city library the tech department is probably funded by grants from private foundations. Sometimes they get some government money from sending books to a scanning and pulping operations, but only if they have enough rare books that it's worth the effort. Their buildings are usually something that was condemned or abandoned. If it's an East coast and nice looking that's explained by the robber barons that established them a while back. The foundation is generally bankrupt but may still restrict the actions of the library for good or ill.
The library is unfortunately a dying institution. They can't even lend out software. And their efforts to offers to lend scanned books online can only apply to books printed before 1850-1925 depending on when the author died. Hours are constantly cut back in even the wealthiest library systems. By now there should be 24-7 libraries.
If I ever fund a library it will be open 24-7, foundation supported and have not be allowed to accept any operating funds from any government.
I can picture these 'brains' watching movies and all sorts of art to feed them ideas and churning out art at incredible speeds. I think you're foolish to think that actors will NEVER be replaced.
Well I think most sentient computers wouldn't want to be actors. And if one wanted to, it would charge exorbenant rates. It would still be cheaper to hire an human actor, at least for the bit parts.
Here's my problem with the universe of class action lawsuits: out of this $300 million, the lawyers are going to take 30% or so. This is a tidy little sum. The people who were gouged are going to end up with not-so-much relative to the amounts they were "overbilled". Probably less than the inflation-adjusted price of a Princess telephone.
I once had a Providian credit card with like a 5.9% intro rate that was supposed to last for a year, and a 9.9% rate after that. Another bank bought them and raised the rate immediately to almost 27%. I got quite upset and tried to talk to them and they said there was no record of the 5.9% rate was supposed to go on for some time. Well I paid down the balance which took a few months since I had transfered all my other balances to the card. So I was out a few hundred bucks.
About a year and a half later I get a statement saying I can get a real low rate for a year if I sign up again because of a settlement in a class action. I could also refuse that and get a check for like $25, but the lawyer already took a $100 on my part for the $300 value of my settlement.
Still I'm happy that the new bank paid someone for their evil. And the $25 is better than those $1000 rebate checks people get to buy another car from the same company that sold them the auto-kill-passengers model.
I think I also received a bunch of coupons from some phone monopoly a while back too, never used any. They had billed $2/mo for some imaginary service for a couple years. It seems to me that these settlements are always too low, it shouldn't pay to commit fraud. Criminal charges are the only real solution. But if that were evenly applied our president would probably still be in prison.:/ Until then, the bigger settlements probably discourage some fraud, since the fraud itself hurts the non-monopolies, like that credit card company I left, in the long run. Combined with the settlement of the lawyers fees it may actually make some of it not pay.
It is incumbent upon you as a free-thinking individual to read, understand and evaluate the writings of Congress.
I know a lot of people that break a bunch of silly laws before they get out of bed in the morning. Most of them don't vote because they feel that is implicit support for the government. I can't say they are all that wrong, loss of confidence is a pre-requisite for replacing the current regime. At this point in the States the confidence is low enough, there's just no concensus on what would come in it's place.
It would have to be peaceful too, as it was in the Soviet Union. So the military needs to be convinced and that is much harder since it's a volunteer army so it is even more conservative than a conscript one. And it still doesn't mean you should be unaware of the idiots in congress, since their actions can be used to convince the soldiers. But what's more important is to figure out a better form of government that can unite a good majority of the populace behind it.
One of our characteristics as humans is that we try to assign narratives to everything. This is a great thing because it forces us to come up with theories and then through discussion refine them. But sometimes there isn't a reason, as with random processes like evolution. You didn't say there was a reason for HIV, so I won't belabor the point.
It's still a good question, it looks like it has redirected some of the hive's mind to figuring out retro-viruses and also to figuring out biological data storage and manufacturing devices (DNA & RNA). This is probably better use of medical researchers than a random trial and error attack on cancer.
As far as biological evolution, this will happen to an extent. But not so much really, remember the plague, black death? Well less than 5% of Europeans has any immunity. We discovered hand washing and rat control before it really reworked the genome. Condoms and medicine will do the same for HIV.
Many large cats do have a HIV like virus that once decimated their population and for the last 100,000 years have evolved to fight it off, though with a dimished life span. We're not gonna wait that long for a solution...
Yeah, in fact someone told me about a determinastic polynomial algorithm almost a year ago. Maybe he was a reviewer for this paper, I dunno. But I assume someone more knowledgable will pipe up on this eventually. What I know is that there are some known composites that look like primes to the Miller and Rabin algorithms, and they can wreak havock to encryption. I think there is a test for these, but there may be more of em out there. Carmichel is the name that pops in my head, but I'm probably wrong.
In anycase, for cryptography you would probably run the randomized algorithm on a bunch a numbers until you found a number to be a prime with high probability, then you would run this to verify that it is a prime with higher certainty. The certainty sorta depends on the length of the proof for this algorithm. Since for a sufficiently complex proof there is a non-zero probability that the proof is not correct, and the probabilistic algorithms often have simple proofs that we may be more certain of.
The terraflop statistic is a little hard for me to swallow.
The SIMD math on a P4 is less than 3% of the die, and it's something like 2*4*2.5Ghz=20gigaflops theoretical. (retiring two instructions per clock, 4 elements at a time, 2.5 Ghz clock, not practical due to memory slowness, but possible. Don't do any divisions though, and multiplications will halve this. even if avoiding underflow.) Now 100%/3%=33, so you have 660gigaflops theoretically using today's technology differently. Add two years and stir.
Now you still need cache, but with a bunch of these processing elements doing mostly graphics you can stream data from one to the next and get away with a small "scratch pad" memory on chip. They'll have a few execution cores because being able to do two 16 element SIMD instructions isn't as useful as eight 4 element SIMD instructions.
Still won't be very useful for cryptography though, this is all floating point performance.
I can't agree with the dropping of primative types, since they are just so darn useful for graphics programming. But I wouldn't mind if the methods first depricated in JDK1.2 (Java 2, right?) were eliminated in Java 3. It would require a little bit of fixing for me, since I've used them for backward compatibility, but only an hour or two per program.
Dropping the original IO or AWT would suck because at times they are 10x faster than the newer equivalents. I learned that by porting, then screaming, then unporting. I wouldn't mind if AWT and the original IO were lost in Java 4, after being depricated when Java 3 is introduced. Then we can push for the performance and completeness increases in those before we have to use them, perhaps by carefully refactoring the newer stuff not to depend on the old, nativizing some things, etc. So a JColor would be introduced for instance. The new io is too complex, but it is the complex we know;P
Porting code to a new languange is no small thing. I'd rather port to C++ if the effort is that large, it has become a lot more standards compliant in the last 7 years...
I know people that complained Java 1.3 wasn't backward compatible enough because of how it treated anonymous packages. I can see those ppl switching to C#.
AC is much better for distributing power, thats why Edison lost.
No, high voltage is much better for distributing power. Changing voltages used to be much harder with DC. It may still be for really high currents and voltages, I dunno.
The savings at high voltage are just a matter of V=I*R & Power=VI
VI=I^2*R
So if you want to minimize the power lost over a transmission line you want to make the current(I) as small as possible, but you still want to transmit a lot of power so you raise the voltage. Once you the electricity near conducting stuff you want to minimize the voltage so that it is less likely to arc and jump through another conductor, esp if said conductor is a person or pet.
With AC it's easy to make transformers that are 99.99% efficient, so you can have all these gradiations of voltage for different levels of safety and effeciency. (Easy but these things are still big. Not your average wall wart.)
Switching transformers are used on things like your laptop, but not your average 802.11b AP. Those use a conventional wall wart and a very inefficient voltage regulator to get the voltage to exactly 3.3V or 5V or whatever. Even those laptop transformers aren't that efficient, though definately lighter and probably cheaper than the equivalent conventional transformer.
A housewide transformer with 5V, 6V, 7.5V & 12V leads might or might not be more efficient, but I'd love it for the conveniance and clutter avoidance potential. Something like open feeds along the wall that you could just snap your device cord to. Maybe made out of some high tension wire like they hang those halogen lamps from sometimes. It could be really slick. It would only need five wires for all those voltages, and you could even make a +/- 6V supply for your electronics projects using the 0, 6 & 12 Volt leads... You also get a 1V, 1.5V, 2.5V, 4.5V and 7V out of those, maybe 2 of those are useful for battery replacement devices. Maybe a 9V lead would be useful too, that would get you the rest of the 12 V battery voltages.
3. Marketing: Movies are (used to be more in the past) released at different times in different markets for various reasons
Yep, the American trailers for Amalie totally turned me off to seeing the movie. When I saw the French ones I went out and rented the DVD. All the time wishing I'd seen it in the theater. Sigh.
Nope, more than 12% of the kids. 12% of the children in the study had both the gene problem and violent childhoods. There is no way to figure out how many of the violent criminals were abused, but we know it was more than 44%. It is probably more like 70-80%.
more able to ignore the social factors that lead to crime
The economist article explained that social factors were very important. Of the set with low-promoter regions and violent childhoods 85% had anti-social behavior. The next most violent group was the one without the DNA problem and violent childhoods, 45% of them were still violent.
There is one dutch family where many of the men don't have the oxidase-A gene at all and they are all "notoriously violent men." But this is very rare, unfortunately just having a low level of this mood regulator isn't rare. Having too high a level is related to depression so that's not so great either.
Having a peaceful home whether you have the gene problem or not is good, and even out of those abused with the problem DNA 3 out of 20 still turn out ok. The fact that 12% of the kids had been maltreated and had the problem gene is shocking to me, it means over 12% of the kids were abused at all. Now they may include non-parental abuse here, but still it's a big number we should do something about. Not just because those 12% accounted for 44% of those criminally convicted of violence, but because we want to live in a fair world. The fact that it will reduce crime 5-10 years out should be a good budgetary reason though.
Just imagine a major running campaign on reducing taxes through police attrition, or if you're liberal, extending free education out to the 2nd or 3rd year of college through court cost reductions. It sounds almost unimaginable now.
I mean how may people can these folks contact in an hour? If they are trying to make it look like a chance encounter then they can't be doing it to every person that passes by.
My guess is that if the product is any good it could work really well. I've been approached when using WiFi in a coffee shop by total strangers that then went out and got a wireless modem. Then I've seen total strangers approach them, etc. It's an exponential growth curve until the market gets saturated.
I'm not too bothered by this ether. A couple years ago I saw someone playing doom on his cell phone a and it didn't take long to discover he worked for Nokia. As long as it they don't actively conceal who they work for it's ok. I remember when PC sellers told you the technical specs of their computers down to the brand name of their components. They were a lot more useful than the "$599! Runs the internet!" ads now a days. This is effectively a product demonstration at my conveniance.
And they might even discover I'll tell more friends about it if I actually get the "ho7 g3ek gURL's" number;)
Naturally, free and independent email services would operate alongside it, but imagine if, for a reasonable fee, you could have a postal service mail account in which all e-mails it sends or recieves have all the same protections and legal bearing of snail mail.
I would gladly pay 50c for a service that worked like registered mail. Or even 5c on occasion for an e-mail that I knew would reach it's intended recipient. They could charge extra to e-mail snail mail addresses too. It might cost them less to just print it out at the destination and carry it to someone's home than to actually ship letters, they could print it out on thin paper too to save weight. Even if it wasn't it would be faster & more convenient...
Real snail mail could be reserved for post cards and love letters.
Oh, by the way. The reason that the resistance is such a problem? They're DC motors. That's why they can be REVERSED and used as generators. You can't do that with alternators/AC motors.
The resistance is a problem because the voltage is only 600V vs 720,000V on an above ground transmission line. 32,000V is the most I know of on underground line. A bigger problem they didn't talk about is that there isn't one big 600V third rail. Each station, more or less, converts grid electricity into 600V DC for the area surrounding it. So two trains, one accelerating and one decelerating near a single station would be needed to use the electricity. Maybe true during rush hour, but definitely not most of the time.
The AC vs. DC isn't really an issue the new trains that will be running on the L use AC motors. The L line is the only totally isolated track so they will be testing unmanned trains there too. The third rail is 600 V DC. The AC motors will generate AC on a range of frequencies when stopping, but this is all converted to DC before being shunted to the third rail. Normally this would raise the voltage unless another train was accelerating out of the station, since the stations don't try to convert the DC back to AC and send it back to the grid. But with the flywheels the energy will instead be stored for when the train leaves the station.
I believe the old trains do have regenerative breaking, but mostly to save wear and tear on the breaks. This is only an experiment, maybe it's better to get the generated power back to the grid. It depends on how reliable these things are. The iron rich air in the subway tends to be brutal on electronics, hopefully they have isolated space to put them in. The track power distribution has system has changed a couple times since the original 11,000V 25 Hz. First cuz mercury arc rectifiers were invented and later cuz solid state rectifiers became usable for high power applications. They don't care much about higher frequencies, so they allowed the switch to 60Hz grid power. The original rotary converters probably did distribute regenerative breaking power to other trains much better than the current system, but the cost was still much greater since the subway operators had to run their own power generation and distribution systems. I don't know if the trains had regenerative breaking back then anyway, some of them were wood with coal heaters, not exactly high tech.
What about the homeless people who rely on the subway heat vents in the winter?
They actually hang out near the steam vents so it's not really a problem. I live near a co-generation plant so there are a few extra citizens on cold winter days around here.
They need to run some tests where the memory to GPU bandwidth dominates the problem. For example, open up 3DS Max, Maya, or Softimage XSI with a complicated textured scene that can't redraw at full frame rate, and see if it helps.
I agree, it's silly to benchmark AGPx8 on games which are designed to run on the current crop of video cards and at least one generation back. The ATI 9700 and the NV30 are really streaming processors with a really slow memory access, games can compress textures and use low polygon optimized models because they throw lots of programmers at the problem. Now with floating point instead of bytes for the buffers that will need 4 times the bandwidth for the same performance, for better pictures of course. A good test would be to send a high dynamic range (floating point RGB) movie as a texture for a cube map, see if the frame rate isn't exactly twice as fast as AGPx4 then... Or just send 10 nice 0.5 million triangle subd surfaces, the frame rate will be dreadfully slow, even if the hardware accelerator can handle the load.
Besides, his first kill was with a beard axe, not a sword.
Grrr, I think that doesn't really matter in sword play darwin theory I was trying to debunk. And I haven't seen the actual trace, it's just in a couple independent geneology books. Iceland has a long history of keeping the records clean so I don't doubt it much, but don't really care so much either. Once you go back 3 generations there isn't much left to be discovered at 4,5,6... It's just fodder for funny comments.
What does a vectorizing compiler for a C-like language for the x86/PS2 have to do with a C-like shader language for nVIDIA graphics processors?
The PS2 has two almost identical MIPS chips souped up with fast SIMD math instructions. One runs the OS/AI/etc, as a pretty standard processor. The other is dedicated to process vertex arrays and the like. This is the "GPU" But really it is a full fledged processor that simply used in a streaming fashion.
The talk this year at SIGGRAPH was all about how the GPU's are all becoming streaming processors that can handle almost anything thrown at them. Using them effectively is all about never asking for any data not already fetched, that is no random access to memory. A huge portion of the die on a modern CPU is dedicated to caching, GPU's get faster at a greater rate because they use most of their die for logic gates and what is left is used for the very specialized texture memory access, with little or no caching of random access.
As for the integer arguement, I think nVidia heard that loud and clear, and it's almost certainly going to be in OpenGL 2 shader language (which is C like and has branching and loops even in the fragment shader.) 3D Labs and ATI promise drivers weeks after ratification. Except for integers nVidia should be able to do this in their driver with extra passes. For integers they can just suggest 'safe' texture sizes for data as a work around.
OpenGL2 also asks for effectively unlimited program size, which no one will have initially. This of course can be simulated with more passes, but you'll be reponsible for any such splitting since it tells you whether the shader compiled and 'out of program space' is one of the acceptable errors.
ATI is known for not so great drivers and 3D Labs has an external company writing their linux drivers, so I'm not sure they will be any more stable than the nVidia ones. Both booths told me the linux drivers would be closed source, but I didn't ask so I guess they are hearing people asking for easier to fix drivers.
ok, I'll bite...his _first_ sword? You mean he was given another one after this?
When he was older, they didn't have prisons back then, so either you were executed or not, and well he was only ten. You weren't allowed to leave the county if you owed money, so not everything got you executed. Someone later in life stuck an ax in his head and he is said to have killed him too, but I guess that was considered legitimite. Archeologists dug up his body a few years ago and verified that he lived long after the ax injury (that is the bone regrew.)
It's a parallax barrier system, this is for the 3-D to work. If it didn't spin it would have big black stripes and you wouldn't be able to fuse the images. This doesn't help with the low resolution as someone else suggested, they just used an LED display because it was much cheaper to buy billboard display blocks than lots of custom LCD displays. It is probably easier to drive the low res display. It takes a special display server with four digital video cables to drive IBM's high res display, this would probably be similar with the large 360 degree stereo view.
Further evidence Darwin, and his theory of natural selection, is indeed, correct.
I have an ex-girlfriend that used to be a big SCA fan, she has some pretty neat swords and didn't mind using them. She's now married and 5 months pregnant and I long ago decided not to have children, I'd say the odds are good that sword play doesn't hurt your procreative chances. I for one had an ancestor that killed three of his playmates with his first sword, on his 10th b-day no less.
I'd rather play with that gyro sword from e-tech and you can see where that path has led....
Slashdot Mirror
Now all you see for miles around is shops with silver chairs and tables out the front and streets littered with empty 4 gallon coffee cups.
Man I don't think I want to see how jittery those 4 gallon coffee drinkers must get. That's like 1-2 gallons of real coffee!
And from other comments, it appears as though many libraries already use that policy. An onymous borrowing is totally unnecessary.
I've never worked at a library that kept the records for long. But most books aren't checked out very often. Sensitive books are mostly read in the library so your record could easily be kept for 10-15 years even if they only keep a record of the last person that checked out the book. I shelved Mien Kampf every 6 months or so but it hadn't been checked out in years. I was only one page out of 4 in the branch so it was read every 6 weeks or so.
They kept the last person checking out the book in case it was reported damaged by the next patron. Of course an expiration date on that would have made sense since you can't claim someone who had the book two years ago damaged it. But libraries subsist on donations and usually a stipend for salaries, and sometimes building maintenance. Large city libraries purchase books, but them smaller ones rent them or get the donated. If you ever checked out a book with a green label it was probably rented. Sometimes this is just the new fiction.
Unless it's a large city library the tech department is probably funded by grants from private foundations. Sometimes they get some government money from sending books to a scanning and pulping operations, but only if they have enough rare books that it's worth the effort. Their buildings are usually something that was condemned or abandoned. If it's an East coast and nice looking that's explained by the robber barons that established them a while back. The foundation is generally bankrupt but may still restrict the actions of the library for good or ill.
The library is unfortunately a dying institution. They can't even lend out software. And their efforts to offers to lend scanned books online can only apply to books printed before 1850-1925 depending on when the author died. Hours are constantly cut back in even the wealthiest library systems. By now there should be 24-7 libraries.
If I ever fund a library it will be open 24-7, foundation supported and have not be allowed to accept any operating funds from any government.
I can picture these 'brains' watching movies and all sorts of art to feed them ideas and churning out art at incredible speeds. I think you're foolish to think that actors will NEVER be replaced.
Well I think most sentient computers wouldn't want to be actors. And if one wanted to, it would charge exorbenant rates. It would still be cheaper to hire an human actor, at least for the bit parts.
Here's my problem with the universe of class action lawsuits: out of this $300 million, the lawyers are going to take 30% or so. This is a tidy little sum. The people who were gouged are going to end up with not-so-much relative to the amounts they were "overbilled". Probably less than the inflation-adjusted price of a Princess telephone.
:/ Until then, the bigger settlements probably discourage some fraud, since the fraud itself hurts the non-monopolies, like that credit card company I left, in the long run. Combined with the settlement of the lawyers fees it may actually make some of it not pay.
I once had a Providian credit card with like a 5.9% intro rate that was supposed to last for a year, and a 9.9% rate after that. Another bank bought them and raised the rate immediately to almost 27%. I got quite upset and tried to talk to them and they said there was no record of the 5.9% rate was supposed to go on for some time. Well I paid down the balance which took a few months since I had transfered all my other balances to the card. So I was out a few hundred bucks.
About a year and a half later I get a statement saying I can get a real low rate for a year if I sign up again because of a settlement in a class action. I could also refuse that and get a check for like $25, but the lawyer already took a $100 on my part for the $300 value of my settlement.
Still I'm happy that the new bank paid someone for their evil. And the $25 is better than those $1000 rebate checks people get to buy another car from the same company that sold them the auto-kill-passengers model.
I think I also received a bunch of coupons from some phone monopoly a while back too, never used any. They had billed $2/mo for some imaginary service for a couple years. It seems to me that these settlements are always too low, it shouldn't pay to commit fraud. Criminal charges are the only real solution. But if that were evenly applied our president would probably still be in prison.
It is incumbent upon you as a free-thinking individual to read, understand and evaluate the writings of Congress.
I know a lot of people that break a bunch of silly laws before they get out of bed in the morning. Most of them don't vote because they feel that is implicit support for the government. I can't say they are all that wrong, loss of confidence is a pre-requisite for replacing the current regime. At this point in the States the confidence is low enough, there's just no concensus on what would come in it's place.
It would have to be peaceful too, as it was in the Soviet Union. So the military needs to be convinced and that is much harder since it's a volunteer army so it is even more conservative than a conscript one. And it still doesn't mean you should be unaware of the idiots in congress, since their actions can be used to convince the soldiers. But what's more important is to figure out a better form of government that can unite a good majority of the populace behind it.
So what is HIV doing to human evolution?
One of our characteristics as humans is that we try to assign narratives to everything. This is a great thing because it forces us to come up with theories and then through discussion refine them. But sometimes there isn't a reason, as with random processes like evolution. You didn't say there was a reason for HIV, so I won't belabor the point.
It's still a good question, it looks like it has redirected some of the hive's mind to figuring out retro-viruses and also to figuring out biological data storage and manufacturing devices (DNA & RNA). This is probably better use of medical researchers than a random trial and error attack on cancer.
As far as biological evolution, this will happen to an extent. But not so much really, remember the plague, black death? Well less than 5% of Europeans has any immunity. We discovered hand washing and rat control before it really reworked the genome. Condoms and medicine will do the same for HIV.
Many large cats do have a HIV like virus that once decimated their population and for the last 100,000 years have evolved to fight it off, though with a dimished life span. We're not gonna wait that long for a solution...
Yeah, in fact someone told me about a determinastic polynomial algorithm almost a year ago. Maybe he was a reviewer for this paper, I dunno. But I assume someone more knowledgable will pipe up on this eventually. What I know is that there are some known composites that look like primes to the Miller and Rabin algorithms, and they can wreak havock to encryption. I think there is a test for these, but there may be more of em out there. Carmichel is the name that pops in my head, but I'm probably wrong.
In anycase, for cryptography you would probably run the randomized algorithm on a bunch a numbers until you found a number to be a prime with high probability, then you would run this to verify that it is a prime with higher certainty. The certainty sorta depends on the length of the proof for this algorithm. Since for a sufficiently complex proof there is a non-zero probability that the proof is not correct, and the probabilistic algorithms often have simple proofs that we may be more certain of.
I just keep repeating that over and over again in my head. $800+S/H.
I could finally discover how big a silly puddy ball can get and still bounce...
I could glue a cat to the wall by it's paws!
I could transfer an entire newspaper to puddy!
The terraflop statistic is a little hard for me to swallow.
The SIMD math on a P4 is less than 3% of the die, and it's something like 2*4*2.5Ghz=20gigaflops theoretical. (retiring two instructions per clock, 4 elements at a time, 2.5 Ghz clock, not practical due to memory slowness, but possible. Don't do any divisions though, and multiplications will halve this. even if avoiding underflow.) Now 100%/3%=33, so you have 660gigaflops theoretically using today's technology differently. Add two years and stir.
Now you still need cache, but with a bunch of these processing elements doing mostly graphics you can stream data from one to the next and get away with a small "scratch pad" memory on chip. They'll have a few execution cores because being able to do two 16 element SIMD instructions isn't as useful as eight 4 element SIMD instructions.
Still won't be very useful for cryptography though, this is all floating point performance.
I can't agree with the dropping of primative types, since they are just so darn useful for graphics programming. But I wouldn't mind if the methods first depricated in JDK1.2 (Java 2, right?) were eliminated in Java 3. It would require a little bit of fixing for me, since I've used them for backward compatibility, but only an hour or two per program.
;P
Dropping the original IO or AWT would suck because at times they are 10x faster than the newer equivalents. I learned that by porting, then screaming, then unporting. I wouldn't mind if AWT and the original IO were lost in Java 4, after being depricated when Java 3 is introduced. Then we can push for the performance and completeness increases in those before we have to use them, perhaps by carefully refactoring the newer stuff not to depend on the old, nativizing some things, etc. So a JColor would be introduced for instance. The new io is too complex, but it is the complex we know
Porting code to a new languange is no small thing. I'd rather port to C++ if the effort is that large, it has become a lot more standards compliant in the last 7 years...
I know people that complained Java 1.3 wasn't backward compatible enough because of how it treated anonymous packages. I can see those ppl switching to C#.
AC is much better for distributing power, thats why Edison lost.
No, high voltage is much better for distributing power. Changing voltages used to be much harder with DC. It may still be for really high currents and voltages, I dunno.
The savings at high voltage are just a matter of V=I*R & Power=VI
VI=I^2*R
So if you want to minimize the power lost over a transmission line you want to make the current(I) as small as possible, but you still want to transmit a lot of power so you raise the voltage. Once you the electricity near conducting stuff you want to minimize the voltage so that it is less likely to arc and jump through another conductor, esp if said conductor is a person or pet.
With AC it's easy to make transformers that are 99.99% efficient, so you can have all these gradiations of voltage for different levels of safety and effeciency. (Easy but these things are still big. Not your average wall wart.)
Switching transformers are used on things like your laptop, but not your average 802.11b AP. Those use a conventional wall wart and a very inefficient voltage regulator to get the voltage to exactly 3.3V or 5V or whatever. Even those laptop transformers aren't that efficient, though definately lighter and probably cheaper than the equivalent conventional transformer.
A housewide transformer with 5V, 6V, 7.5V & 12V leads might or might not be more efficient, but I'd love it for the conveniance and clutter avoidance potential. Something like open feeds along the wall that you could just snap your device cord to. Maybe made out of some high tension wire like they hang those halogen lamps from sometimes. It could be really slick. It would only need five wires for all those voltages, and you could even make a +/- 6V supply for your electronics projects using the 0, 6 & 12 Volt leads... You also get a 1V, 1.5V, 2.5V, 4.5V and 7V out of those, maybe 2 of those are useful for battery replacement devices. Maybe a 9V lead would be useful too, that would get you the rest of the 12 V battery voltages.
Go to a bar or something. Meet women.
Hey! I'm in a bar waiting for a woman to show up.
The guy a couple seats down is trying to hack me, so it's kinda fun.
I think NY is getting geeky.
3. Marketing: Movies are (used to be more in the past) released at different times in different markets for various reasons
Yep, the American trailers for Amalie totally turned me off to seeing the movie. When I saw the French ones I went out and rented the DVD. All the time wishing I'd seen it in the theater. Sigh.
Nope, more than 12% of the kids. 12% of the children in the study had both the gene problem and violent childhoods. There is no way to figure out how many of the violent criminals were abused, but we know it was more than 44%. It is probably more like 70-80%.
more able to ignore the social factors that lead to crime
The economist article explained that social factors were very important. Of the set with low-promoter regions and violent childhoods 85% had anti-social behavior. The next most violent group was the one without the DNA problem and violent childhoods, 45% of them were still violent.
There is one dutch family where many of the men don't have the oxidase-A gene at all and they are all "notoriously violent men." But this is very rare, unfortunately just having a low level of this mood regulator isn't rare. Having too high a level is related to depression so that's not so great either.
Having a peaceful home whether you have the gene problem or not is good, and even out of those abused with the problem DNA 3 out of 20 still turn out ok. The fact that 12% of the kids had been maltreated and had the problem gene is shocking to me, it means over 12% of the kids were abused at all. Now they may include non-parental abuse here, but still it's a big number we should do something about. Not just because those 12% accounted for 44% of those criminally convicted of violence, but because we want to live in a fair world. The fact that it will reduce crime 5-10 years out should be a good budgetary reason though.
Just imagine a major running campaign on reducing taxes through police attrition, or if you're liberal, extending free education out to the 2nd or 3rd year of college through court cost reductions. It sounds almost unimaginable now.
I mean how may people can these folks contact in an hour? If they are trying to make it look like a chance encounter then they can't be doing it to every person that passes by.
;)
My guess is that if the product is any good it could work really well. I've been approached when using WiFi in a coffee shop by total strangers that then went out and got a wireless modem. Then I've seen total strangers approach them, etc. It's an exponential growth curve until the market gets saturated.
I'm not too bothered by this ether. A couple years ago I saw someone playing doom on his cell phone a and it didn't take long to discover he worked for Nokia. As long as it they don't actively conceal who they work for it's ok. I remember when PC sellers told you the technical specs of their computers down to the brand name of their components. They were a lot more useful than the "$599! Runs the internet!" ads now a days. This is effectively a product demonstration at my conveniance.
And they might even discover I'll tell more friends about it if I actually get the "ho7 g3ek gURL's" number
Naturally, free and independent email services would operate alongside it, but imagine if, for a reasonable fee, you could have a postal service mail account in which all e-mails it sends or recieves have all the same protections and legal bearing of snail mail.
I would gladly pay 50c for a service that worked like registered mail. Or even 5c on occasion for an e-mail that I knew would reach it's intended recipient. They could charge extra to e-mail snail mail addresses too. It might cost them less to just print it out at the destination and carry it to someone's home than to actually ship letters, they could print it out on thin paper too to save weight. Even if it wasn't it would be faster & more convenient...
Real snail mail could be reserved for post cards and love letters.
Oh, by the way. The reason that the resistance is such a problem? They're DC motors. That's why they can be REVERSED and used as generators. You can't do that with alternators/AC motors.
The resistance is a problem because the voltage is only 600V vs 720,000V on an above ground transmission line. 32,000V is the most I know of on underground line. A bigger problem they didn't talk about is that there isn't one big 600V third rail. Each station, more or less, converts grid electricity into 600V DC for the area surrounding it. So two trains, one accelerating and one decelerating near a single station would be needed to use the electricity. Maybe true during rush hour, but definitely not most of the time.
The AC vs. DC isn't really an issue the new trains that will be running on the L use AC motors. The L line is the only totally isolated track so they will be testing unmanned trains there too. The third rail is 600 V DC. The AC motors will generate AC on a range of frequencies when stopping, but this is all converted to DC before being shunted to the third rail. Normally this would raise the voltage unless another train was accelerating out of the station, since the stations don't try to convert the DC back to AC and send it back to the grid. But with the flywheels the energy will instead be stored for when the train leaves the station.
I believe the old trains do have regenerative breaking, but mostly to save wear and tear on the breaks. This is only an experiment, maybe it's better to get the generated power back to the grid. It depends on how reliable these things are. The iron rich air in the subway tends to be brutal on electronics, hopefully they have isolated space to put them in. The track power distribution has system has changed a couple times since the original 11,000V 25 Hz. First cuz mercury arc rectifiers were invented and later cuz solid state rectifiers became usable for high power applications. They don't care much about higher frequencies, so they allowed the switch to 60Hz grid power. The original rotary converters probably did distribute regenerative breaking power to other trains much better than the current system, but the cost was still much greater since the subway operators had to run their own power generation and distribution systems. I don't know if the trains had regenerative breaking back then anyway, some of them were wood with coal heaters, not exactly high tech.
PS IANSE, just an EE with an interest in trains.
What about the homeless people who rely on the subway heat vents in the winter?
They actually hang out near the steam vents so it's not really a problem. I live near a co-generation plant so there are a few extra citizens on cold winter days around here.
They need to run some tests where the memory to GPU bandwidth dominates the problem. For example, open up 3DS Max, Maya, or Softimage XSI with a complicated textured scene that can't redraw at full frame rate, and see if it helps.
I agree, it's silly to benchmark AGPx8 on games which are designed to run on the current crop of video cards and at least one generation back. The ATI 9700 and the NV30 are really streaming processors with a really slow memory access, games can compress textures and use low polygon optimized models because they throw lots of programmers at the problem. Now with floating point instead of bytes for the buffers that will need 4 times the bandwidth for the same performance, for better pictures of course. A good test would be to send a high dynamic range (floating point RGB) movie as a texture for a cube map, see if the frame rate isn't exactly twice as fast as AGPx4 then... Or just send 10 nice 0.5 million triangle subd surfaces, the frame rate will be dreadfully slow, even if the hardware accelerator can handle the load.
Besides, his first kill was with a beard axe, not a sword.
Grrr, I think that doesn't really matter in sword play darwin theory I was trying to debunk. And I haven't seen the actual trace, it's just in a couple independent geneology books. Iceland has a long history of keeping the records clean so I don't doubt it much, but don't really care so much either. Once you go back 3 generations there isn't much left to be discovered at 4,5,6... It's just fodder for funny comments.
What does a vectorizing compiler for a C-like language for the x86/PS2 have to do with a C-like shader language for nVIDIA graphics processors?
The PS2 has two almost identical MIPS chips souped up with fast SIMD math instructions. One runs the OS/AI/etc, as a pretty standard processor. The other is dedicated to process vertex arrays and the like. This is the "GPU" But really it is a full fledged processor that simply used in a streaming fashion.
The talk this year at SIGGRAPH was all about how the GPU's are all becoming streaming processors that can handle almost anything thrown at them. Using them effectively is all about never asking for any data not already fetched, that is no random access to memory. A huge portion of the die on a modern CPU is dedicated to caching, GPU's get faster at a greater rate because they use most of their die for logic gates and what is left is used for the very specialized texture memory access, with little or no caching of random access.
As for the integer arguement, I think nVidia heard that loud and clear, and it's almost certainly going to be in OpenGL 2 shader language (which is C like and has branching and loops even in the fragment shader.) 3D Labs and ATI promise drivers weeks after ratification. Except for integers nVidia should be able to do this in their driver with extra passes. For integers they can just suggest 'safe' texture sizes for data as a work around.
OpenGL2 also asks for effectively unlimited program size, which no one will have initially. This of course can be simulated with more passes, but you'll be reponsible for any such splitting since it tells you whether the shader compiled and 'out of program space' is one of the acceptable errors.
ATI is known for not so great drivers and 3D Labs has an external company writing their linux drivers, so I'm not sure they will be any more stable than the nVidia ones. Both booths told me the linux drivers would be closed source, but I didn't ask so I guess they are hearing people asking for easier to fix drivers.
ok, I'll bite...his _first_ sword? You mean he was given another one after this?
When he was older, they didn't have prisons back then, so either you were executed or not, and well he was only ten. You weren't allowed to leave the county if you owed money, so not everything got you executed. Someone later in life stuck an ax in his head and he is said to have killed him too, but I guess that was considered legitimite. Archeologists dug up his body a few years ago and verified that he lived long after the ax injury (that is the bone regrew.)
It's a parallax barrier system, this is for the 3-D to work. If it didn't spin it would have big black stripes and you wouldn't be able to fuse the images. This doesn't help with the low resolution as someone else suggested, they just used an LED display because it was much cheaper to buy billboard display blocks than lots of custom LCD displays. It is probably easier to drive the low res display. It takes a special display server with four digital video cables to drive IBM's high res display, this would probably be similar with the large 360 degree stereo view.
Further evidence Darwin, and his theory of natural selection, is indeed, correct.
I have an ex-girlfriend that used to be a big SCA fan, she has some pretty neat swords and didn't mind using them. She's now married and 5 months pregnant and I long ago decided not to have children, I'd say the odds are good that sword play doesn't hurt your procreative chances. I for one had an ancestor that killed three of his playmates with his first sword, on his 10th b-day no less.
I'd rather play with that gyro sword from e-tech and you can see where that path has led....