Me: By its own admission this film is about a China that never existed in real life, inspired by Jackie Chan movies
You: You obviously don't know anything about Chinese history, do you? Yes, that China did exist (try actually looking up some background material about the movie), but not in many an American's mind, where men like John Wayne ruled the "Wild West".
Um, fella, I pulled that comment from the movie's website. Under about the film the writeup quotes Ang Lee (he had something to do with this film, didn't he? Like making it?) calls the film "kind of a dream of China, a China that probably never existed except in my boyhood fantasies in Taiwan." In the next paragraph he continues, "of course, my boyhood imagination was mostly fuelled by the martial arts movies I grew up with." So if you have a complaint with this sentiment you are taking it up with the wrong person.
No, I haven't seen the movie, though I probably will when it becomes available in New Orleans. Perty things are perty whether they are deep or not.
Before there was The Matrix there was Blade Runner, and before either of these movies there was a man named Philip K. Dick.
Dick heavily inspired the SF writers like K.W. Jeter (anybody remember Dr. Adder?) and Bill Gibson who in turn created cyberpunk. Dick was deeply haunted by two deep questions: What makes a person human? And what is reality?
Before there was no spoon there were replicants; anybody recall the dynamite sequence wherein Prill nearly killed Harrison Ford, stopped only when he shot her several times in midair as she quad-somersaulted over him? But there were deep thoughts behind Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which became Blade Runner in Ridley Scott's hands.
In early 1974 Dick either went insane or was touched by the hand of God, depending on whose interpretation you go by. He received the Gnosis, a divine inspiration which revealed that the universe we live in is actually an illusion (Dick called it the "Black Iron Prison," or BIP in his Exegesis) erected by a cruel God to prevent us from achieving our destiny. The Matrix is an exact allegory of Dick's vision. The technological things that don't make sense, like using humans as batteries, are actually drawn from a Christian mystical tradition older than the Council of Nicea. Behind the Anime-like illustrations of the Matrix are some very deep thoughts indeed.
Now we have Crouching Tiger, wherein the deep thoughts seem to be the lame old crap about blood, honor, faith, and magic. Bleeecch. It really torques my 'nads when I hear some 3133t h4kk3r d00d who has never so much as slaughtered a chicken in real life drone on about the character-building nature of war and adversity. By its own admission this film is about a China that never existed in real life, inspired by Jackie Chan movies. All I can say is, I don't care how many flying kicks they put in, it don't sound like it even comes close to comparing in any meaningful way.
I thought Matrix was one of the best movies ever made, but not because of the bullet-time animation. It was on a par with Last Temptation of Christ for challenging ones' assumptions about long-held beliefs. That is much more important IMHO.
Let me get this straight: You have a main computer you can set up to play continuously. You want to run a cable from it to your stereo, where you will decode this audio when you want it. You will not have the capability of selecting songs, etc. from the stereo, just of opting to play what is being broadcast.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier just to run a piece of wire from the output of the computer's sound card to the aux input of the stereo? Seems like this would give you the same functionality.
You could even dispense with a wire. Radio Quack has a little 2.4 GHz transmitter/receiver pair for this purpose (also handles video, but I just don't use this capability). You can also get low power stereo FM transmitter kits, if you feel handy with a soldering iron, but the good ones cost about the same as the 2.4 GHz preassembled solution.
If the second computer has no effective user interface w/r/t the music then it is entirely redundant. Why use a computer when a piece of wire will do the same job?
NTSC video gives about 3 megabits per second. Call it 400 Kbps for fudge factor. There are 3,600 seconds in an hour. This adds to about 1.4 gigabytes per hour, meaning a 4.5+gig DVD should be able to store over 3 hours of video -- without compression.
For about $200 you can now buy 20 gigabyte hard drives that will accept data much faster than 400 Kbps. I don't see what the big deal is. You play the laserdisc into the video card, record it as one big fat file, do whatever format conversion is necessary (a second hard drive would reduce HD wear here), and write it to the DVD. Then erase and start over.
In business schools QWERTY is used as the classic example of the first, not the best winning in market economies. Other popular examples are VHS over Beta are Windows over Macintosh (or Amiga).
Very poor examples. Neither VHS nor Windows were first.
Beta was first. VHS followed; though its picture quality was technically inferior it was cheaper and allowed greater recording time.
Apple was first both with a marketable computer (the Apple II) and with a marketable GUI (the Mac OS) before IBM or Microsoft had anything comparable. PC architecture won because it was scaleable to more powerful CPU's at the object code level, and because a competetive market of "clone" makers drove prices down below what Apple was charging for comparable wares. (You could not clone Apple II's or Macs because Apple owned the firmware.) The Windows copycat GUI won over Apple's better thought-out plan because it ran on PC's.
OTOH QWERTY won simply because of inertia. It was first, and people were used to it. I type about 130 WPM and don't plan to change, either.
I am sure the various european cultures had their own word for the winter festival for 1000s of years before the christian church
Yule.
came to power around the fall of the Roman empire in the 5th century AD (476AD is commonly cited in the history books)
The Council of Nicea. After Constantine Christianitized what was left of the Roman empire, the council set about selecting the official Christian writings. This is the first point in history at which Christianity would have been recognizable as such to a modern Christian. Some of the ideas suppressed at Nicea were quite bizarre by modern standards. Read up on Gnosticism sometime:-)
The Yule festival was co-opted much later, during campaigns to Christianize the northern barbarians.
When I signed up for ADSL through BellSouth they gave me the modem outright, as long as I stay with the service 60 days. This really isn't much of a commitment. It's a slick move because it's a much better deal than leasing the modem or requiring a year (like Telocity), but they are probably assuming that once you are blown away by the speed you will not want to be discontinuing the service.
Wasn't it Thomas Watson of IBM who said that there would only ever be a need for three computers in the world
It was actually John von Neumann who said there would never be more than 10. Of course, this was back in the late 1940's. At that time I think Alan Turing had a much clearer idea of what the computer would be useful for -- von Neumann only envisioned computers as being useful for attacking otherwise insoluble problems like weather prediction or the hydrodynamics of H-bombs. Turing saw them as universal engines which could mimic the functions of life.
As late as the 1970's "toy computers" were really electromechanical imitations and nobody imagined that real ones would end up in doorbells, coffee makers, and wristwatches. The people making all the foofraw about "smart appliances" are basically trying to avoid the same error. There is really no telling what kind of connectivity we will take for granted in 2020.
On the other hand, it could all go off in some unexpected direction. In the '50's and '60's it was assumed that personal VTOL aircraft would replace cars, pedestrians would be sporting jetpacks, and high energy projects fuelled by cheap nuclear energy would dominate the landscape of the future (our today). While the world has changed a lot, it hasn't changed in those ways. It's almost impossible to say what will turn out to be practical in economic terms given the unknown basic advances which will be coming down the pike.
Realistic MIDI playback may be getting progressively more irrelevant for some (not me...I'm going to be getting a Hoontech XG card as soon as I have the time), but digital musicians rely on MIDI for producing their tunes.
Understood, but my point was that this kind of work can be done within the main CPU now instead of by specialty hardware. When your CPU is capable of doing Fourier transforms in realtime, f'cryinoutloud, why do you need specialty hardware? Why not do MIDI in software so you can upgrade without opening the box?
If NVidia becomes near-monopolistic, we'll end up with the same mediocre performance and features as the SoundBlaster.
I don't understand what you think is missing in soundcards.
Surely this is like the color-depth thing mentioned earlier; once you are scanning and outputting CD-quality 44KHz stereo, what else is there to do? Most of the preprocessing done by early "kick-ass" soundcards is now redundant as it can be done more easily by software on the main CPU. How important is, say, realistic MIDI now when nearly everything is.mp3 and.wav (or functional equivalent)?
There is plenty of room for improvement before we have real-time photorealistic rendering of things like human faces and cloth. OTOH some of the VR problems are pretty much fully solved. I would think sound is one of these.
Homework and/or busywork is pretty much what you'll be doing for the rest of your life when you get out there and work.
Contratulations, your brainwashing is now complete. For your next lesson, you will be expected to run up your credit cards buying a bunch of expensive shit you don't need.
Seriously, work is only like homework/busywork if you take that kind of job. If your goal in life is to put nose to grindstone, do 30 years at a Very Big Firm (tm) where you wear a suit and pay into your 401(k) so you can celebrate your heart attack by buying a fishing cottage, then be my guest. Not all of us want to live that way.
I work for a company that is big enough to be stable (they are a regional distributor of industrial equipment) but small enough that what I do -- mostly programming dinky proprietary controllers in proprietary languages -- is a very big deal. My job is project oriented and I have no supervision to speak of. I pretty much do damn well what I please and I get away with it because the stuff I put together works. (My employer has told me that we are the only firm in our industry doing this kind of work which has never been sued for non-performance.) When I say something shouldn't be done or won't work, we don't do it.
Some people need the structure of a heirarchal work environment, and some people are just miserable there. Some people need the structure of regular homework assignments in school, and some don't. Trying to press everyone into the same mold is a recipe for universal misery.
Fortunately, when I was in school my talents were well known so the cheating thing never came up, but the appropriate answer to such a challenge would be "Ask me anything. Right now." Anybody so foolish as to be unaware that superior performance is possible without make-work should not be passing judgement on actual students.
I was once hired out of HS as an assistant for a computer lab for teachers. We had a fleet of Apple II's, and the prank we cobbled together allowed one to enter lines of code and LIST them back, but reacted to RUN by filling the screen with shifting random crap for a few moments then blanking out and locking up with the message:
MASSIVE SYSTEM FAILURE
It was hilarious until I saw the effect it had on one poor woman who became almost frantically distraught as she thought she was responsible for breaking the then-$1000+ machine. It's harder to demonstrate your superiority to others by doing something useful, but much more rewarding in the end.
In any large city you have a huge population of folks who spend 1-2 hours a day commuting. During this time they can't watch TV (eyes on road, puh-leeze), can't surf the net (damn, forgot that extra-long extension cord, plus eyes on the road puh-leeze) but they can and will listen to the radio.
And while it is possible to hook your PC up to your stereo and listen through the net this really doesn't work too well unless you have broadband access, which most net users don't have either because it isn't available or they don't want to spend $50 a month. And most of the people who could do it don't realize what the possibilities are. I have quite a few acquaintances who have broadband access, but only one (other than me) has hooked his PC up to his stereo -- and he uses it for sound effects in the games he plays, not listening to streaming audio.
For the time being, and probably for at least 5-10 years, and longer in poor communities, radio will be an important medium. BTW, how long do you think it will be before dagummint decides net bandwidth is a limited resource which must be doled out selectively for our own benefit, eh?
Ah, Hollerith cards. I quickly found it was easier to write and debug the assignment in BASIC on a microcomputer and convert it to FORTRAN, than it was to try and actually write a program in FORTRAN directly into a card stack and debug it from the return printouts.
Of course in those days most people didn't have home microcomputers on which to do this.
And I'll let you into a bit of not so secret architectural advice here, 9 times out of 10, you DO NOT NEED THREADS.
It is amazing what you can accomplish by including calls to short tasks in a big inner loop. While it's a bit harder to define your own state machine than it is to write a linear algorithm within a thread, it is SO much cleaner to debug and you can ensure the system is always in a known state when you need to do something.
With today's fast machines you can get away with stuff that would never have worked 10 years ago. At most in Windoze you might need ONE (1) extra thread to maintain the user interface, especially if you're using hoggy database tools instead of building your own files in an efficient manner. I have however updated flat sequential files of nearly a megabyte within single-threaded (don't laugh) VB apps (!) without noticeable UI glitches. Modern machines are just amazing. And that's not even to mention hauling an entire 5 or 10 megabyte array into RAM to do sorts and searches.
Whatever environment you are in, you probably don't need more than 2 threads, and if you think about it you can make one of them really, really simple so that you can fully debug it before you get to work on the other one. You can also temporarily haul your interthread comms out into the file system so you can actually run your threads as separate applications, each with its own debugger, before combining them into a single app. (Really, if you need tighter interthread communication than this allows, you probably don't need to be using separate threads.)
Just my $US0.02. But I write a lot of custom software which must run 24/7 and for which I am the only support staff, so I favor reliablility over all other considerations. I have started to write several threaded apps, but have never actually finished one. Unthreading them has always turned out to be easier than debugging the threads.
Let's see, we got a matrix of wires with magnetic components, this sounds awfully familiar. Just real small.
It is rather neat that they can "grow" these things without paying people to thread magnetic donuts with wire under binocular microscopes. Still, I'll be more impressed when they get a matrix hooked up and are using it to store and retrieve data.
If they do it it will be real interesting, because core storage was very robust. The magnetic particles aren't exposed to the outside world as they are on a disc. Even these very small ones would be well protected compared to the recording surface of a disk or CD.
According to Greenpeace, the CANDU design has a positive void coefficient and supports some hydrogen-evolving reactions in its core (can you say "Chernobyl?"). It also certainly can melt down if coolant is lost and the ECCS fails.
CANDU ECCS systems also seem prone to "water hammer" which violently shakes the pipes when they are kicked in; in June 1974 the Pickering-A reactor blew out a gasket because of this, and because the detectors were clogged operators were unaware that a sump had flooded with radioactive water until major damage had been done.
Yeah, you said "well maintained" too, but in practice things keep happening that aren't supposed to happen. Experience doesn't seem to suggest that humans are capable of keeping things maintained to the standards that are necessary when the failure modes are so numerous and dramatic.
ME:When you look at worst-case scenarios achievable by the actions of angry or distracted operators and engineers, there is nothing humans do as dangerous as the use of nuclear energy.
Anon:This is probably true. OTOH if you look at the normal case scenario a nuclear plant is by far the safest.
The safest method of dealing with dangerous energy levels is not to use dangerous energy levels. The best way to accomplish this is to increase efficiency and exercise frugality so you can subsist on the output of safer sources.
"By far the safest?" That really sounds like nuke-industry propaganda. Even such high-density sources as natural gas are considered cleaner and safer than nuclear. It's just that there is a limit to how much energy you can get from them. That's not even to mention "stereogreen" sources like solar, tidal, and geothermal, which of course are inherently limited both in their output density and their potential for catastrophic self-disassembly.
Much of the core was burned. Uranium, like Plutonium, oxidizes readily into a very fine powder. This is the final form most of the released core material will achieve. It is also possible that some of the core formed agglomerates, tiny metallic particles that have been detected in fallout clouds which form spontaneously from materials which have been fully vaporized by a nuclear explosion.
These particles are most dangerous because they can stay airborne for truly amazing lengths of time and are readily inhaled. Such particles lodge in the lungs, where one can continuously bombard several hundred cells with alpha particles for the rest of your life. The chances of one of them eventually turning cancerous are quite good.
The particles that don't get inhaled eventually either get eaten or get into the groundwater, which are not good fates but are significantly better than ending up in your lungs. The isotopes which are truly dangerous from ingestion methods other than inhalation are generally short-lived, so it doesn't matter quite so much if they get into the ocean or the groundwater or you eat some on your salad.
If there is anyone who wants to debate the safety of a properly designed and properly run nuclear power plant, state your arguments.
Simple. No system operated by human beings is always properly designed and properly run.
All systems which maintain a high energy density are dangerous. The higher the energy density, the more dangerous they are. Despite massive checks and controls we still get the occasional thing that "isn't supposed to happen," usually precisely because the system wasn't properly designed or operated.
When you look at worst-case scenarios achievable by the actions of angry or distracted operators and engineers, there is nothing humans do as dangerous as the use of nuclear energy. It is this that causes the problem; while coal, for example, may be overall as dangerous (a thin argument that ignores the relative reactivity of the emissions), it is the local increase in danger due to a malfunction which is much more limited with the chemical source.
No matter what you do to a coal plant, you can't do much more than destroy the plant itself and knock down a few buildings. An equivalent disaster with nuclear energy can kill thousands immediately, cause hundreds of thousands to die prematurely in the following years, and render hundreds of square miles of land uninhabitable to humans for the foreseeable future.
No, it's not supposed to happen. But things that aren't supposed to happen keep happening despite our best efforts. There is a lesson to be learned from that.
This reminds me of the pieces that come out infrequently from the sex radical community explaining why being gay or into S&M inherently makes you more insightful, empathetic, understanding, and an all-around great person. And of course there are a lot of insightful, empathetic, etc. people who happen to be perverts. There also happen to be a lot of assholes. Nobody has established a causal link, and neither will they establish one for gaming.
Gaming, like gambling, is an elaborate form of masturbation. Yes, it develops an extensive set of responses -- which, guess what, don't translate too well into the real world. (Remember how the narrator of Snow Crash had the coolest hangout possible in cyberspace but lived in a U-Stor-It in real life?)
Gaming is not about making you a better person, or even building a community -- the community thing happens by itself whenever a bunch of people get interested in the same thing. This is why you have a Linux community, a C community, a Sega community, a Nader community, a neighborhood community, a drug community, an HO scale train community, even a Lesbian S&M community.
Gaming itself is about pleasure. People play games because the games are simpler and make more sense and reward you more reliably for your effort than real life. As other people have pointed out here, the responses appropriate in a game environment -- make snap decisions, take risks, shoot at anything that moves, go for the reset button, cheat when necessary -- will get you into big trouble if you attempt to apply them in real life.
I'd say the #1 problem caused by games (but not just by games, also by other electronic media) is that they do not teach patience or perseverence or an extended span of attention. How many games reward you for sitting still for hours, being alert to your environment, and then acting on short notice with little warning when something unexpected happens? How many teach you that the sum of a thousand seemingly pointless boring tasks can be a single achievement, preceeded by no other reward at all, but making the whole effort worthwhile?
I grew up with computers and TV too, in an age when Jerry Mander was moved to write Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (all of which also apply to video games FWIW); in an age when the things Mander complained about were far milder than they are today, it took me years to unlearn a bunch of unhealthy patterns of behavior, and there are some impulses I doubt I'll ever shake.
Back in the dark ages when our parents had to walk to school in the snow (uphill both ways, remember) kids learned patience the hard way -- by being patient. There were long periods of time when there was no entertainment (or none of interest, e.g. nothing but soap operas on TV during summer afternoons), no companions, nothing structured to do; and you learned to deal with those times the way humans learn to deal with everything, by going through them and surviving. Some would turn to reading, some to working out, some to quiet inner contemplation, but most would figure out something interesting to do with a rainy afternoon. But now it seems like every waking moment can be engaged by some electronic companion. While this is a great convenience when we want it, it seems to me that the mental electric wheelchairs have taken over and people are forgetting that they have mental legs, too.
But I don't mean this to be a diatribe against games per se; they are now part of our environment and we will either adapt to their presence or (cough)fail to adapt(cough). It's just that the electronic / computer / gaming world needs its Pat Califia. This was just another tireless but tired advocacy job from the Marquis de Sade.
The very complaint against X86 architecture is that it is CISC, it is throwing architecture where you need to be throwing better technology. Well, here they are at least trying to get better technology.
Every major advance in the last 40 years has been due to increases in clock speed and switch density. Cute tricks like caching and dual-piping or whatever they're calling it this year are flea bites on the butt of real progress. Remember what an "advance" the 486 was over the 386? The corporate boojums need things to market so they make things up when there's nothing real in the pipe, but when something real comes along it doesn't have to be marketed to you because you sure as damn hell notice it.
I mean, my relatively nonobsolte PIII is real cool, but would it really be that much cooler than a machine with 486-level architecture running at the same 450 MHz? For that matter I have to wonder how my tired old 8-bit friends would fare if one could run them at a good fraction of a GHz. Sure, you buy some extra clocks with all those extra transistors trying to second-guess look-ahead your code, but I wonder if that's the best use of all that high-speed silicon. Maybe a *cough* beowulf cluster */cough* of, say, Z80-level CPUs all fabbed on one chip and running at 1GHz could do some really interesting things by comparison.
If this thing is real then great for Intel and for us, it doesn't really matter what architecture they apply it to; and if it isn't real it won't save them when something that is does come along, not matter how good their press releases are.
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You: You obviously don't know anything about Chinese history, do you? Yes, that China did exist (try actually looking up some background material about the movie), but not in many an American's mind, where men like John Wayne ruled the "Wild West".
Um, fella, I pulled that comment from the movie's website. Under about the film the writeup quotes Ang Lee (he had something to do with this film, didn't he? Like making it?) calls the film "kind of a dream of China, a China that probably never existed except in my boyhood fantasies in Taiwan." In the next paragraph he continues, "of course, my boyhood imagination was mostly fuelled by the martial arts movies I grew up with." So if you have a complaint with this sentiment you are taking it up with the wrong person.
No, I haven't seen the movie, though I probably will when it becomes available in New Orleans. Perty things are perty whether they are deep or not.
Dick heavily inspired the SF writers like K.W. Jeter (anybody remember Dr. Adder?) and Bill Gibson who in turn created cyberpunk. Dick was deeply haunted by two deep questions: What makes a person human? And what is reality?
Before there was no spoon there were replicants; anybody recall the dynamite sequence wherein Prill nearly killed Harrison Ford, stopped only when he shot her several times in midair as she quad-somersaulted over him? But there were deep thoughts behind Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which became Blade Runner in Ridley Scott's hands.
In early 1974 Dick either went insane or was touched by the hand of God, depending on whose interpretation you go by. He received the Gnosis, a divine inspiration which revealed that the universe we live in is actually an illusion (Dick called it the "Black Iron Prison," or BIP in his Exegesis) erected by a cruel God to prevent us from achieving our destiny. The Matrix is an exact allegory of Dick's vision. The technological things that don't make sense, like using humans as batteries, are actually drawn from a Christian mystical tradition older than the Council of Nicea. Behind the Anime-like illustrations of the Matrix are some very deep thoughts indeed.
Now we have Crouching Tiger, wherein the deep thoughts seem to be the lame old crap about blood, honor, faith, and magic. Bleeecch. It really torques my 'nads when I hear some 3133t h4kk3r d00d who has never so much as slaughtered a chicken in real life drone on about the character-building nature of war and adversity. By its own admission this film is about a China that never existed in real life, inspired by Jackie Chan movies. All I can say is, I don't care how many flying kicks they put in, it don't sound like it even comes close to comparing in any meaningful way.
I thought Matrix was one of the best movies ever made, but not because of the bullet-time animation. It was on a par with Last Temptation of Christ for challenging ones' assumptions about long-held beliefs. That is much more important IMHO.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier just to run a piece of wire from the output of the computer's sound card to the aux input of the stereo? Seems like this would give you the same functionality.
You could even dispense with a wire. Radio Quack has a little 2.4 GHz transmitter/receiver pair for this purpose (also handles video, but I just don't use this capability). You can also get low power stereo FM transmitter kits, if you feel handy with a soldering iron, but the good ones cost about the same as the 2.4 GHz preassembled solution.
If the second computer has no effective user interface w/r/t the music then it is entirely redundant. Why use a computer when a piece of wire will do the same job?
For about $200 you can now buy 20 gigabyte hard drives that will accept data much faster than 400 Kbps. I don't see what the big deal is. You play the laserdisc into the video card, record it as one big fat file, do whatever format conversion is necessary (a second hard drive would reduce HD wear here), and write it to the DVD. Then erase and start over.
Where's the difficult or expensive part?
Very poor examples. Neither VHS nor Windows were first.
Beta was first. VHS followed; though its picture quality was technically inferior it was cheaper and allowed greater recording time.
Apple was first both with a marketable computer (the Apple II) and with a marketable GUI (the Mac OS) before IBM or Microsoft had anything comparable. PC architecture won because it was scaleable to more powerful CPU's at the object code level, and because a competetive market of "clone" makers drove prices down below what Apple was charging for comparable wares. (You could not clone Apple II's or Macs because Apple owned the firmware.) The Windows copycat GUI won over Apple's better thought-out plan because it ran on PC's.
OTOH QWERTY won simply because of inertia. It was first, and people were used to it. I type about 130 WPM and don't plan to change, either.
Should have called this the one-more-hand-in-your-pocket-dept.
Yule.
came to power around the fall of the Roman empire in the 5th century AD (476AD is commonly cited in the history books)
The Council of Nicea. After Constantine Christianitized what was left of the Roman empire, the council set about selecting the official Christian writings. This is the first point in history at which Christianity would have been recognizable as such to a modern Christian. Some of the ideas suppressed at Nicea were quite bizarre by modern standards. Read up on Gnosticism sometime :-)
The Yule festival was co-opted much later, during campaigns to Christianize the northern barbarians.
When I signed up for ADSL through BellSouth they gave me the modem outright, as long as I stay with the service 60 days. This really isn't much of a commitment. It's a slick move because it's a much better deal than leasing the modem or requiring a year (like Telocity), but they are probably assuming that once you are blown away by the speed you will not want to be discontinuing the service.
It was actually John von Neumann who said there would never be more than 10. Of course, this was back in the late 1940's. At that time I think Alan Turing had a much clearer idea of what the computer would be useful for -- von Neumann only envisioned computers as being useful for attacking otherwise insoluble problems like weather prediction or the hydrodynamics of H-bombs. Turing saw them as universal engines which could mimic the functions of life.
As late as the 1970's "toy computers" were really electromechanical imitations and nobody imagined that real ones would end up in doorbells, coffee makers, and wristwatches. The people making all the foofraw about "smart appliances" are basically trying to avoid the same error. There is really no telling what kind of connectivity we will take for granted in 2020.
On the other hand, it could all go off in some unexpected direction. In the '50's and '60's it was assumed that personal VTOL aircraft would replace cars, pedestrians would be sporting jetpacks, and high energy projects fuelled by cheap nuclear energy would dominate the landscape of the future (our today). While the world has changed a lot, it hasn't changed in those ways. It's almost impossible to say what will turn out to be practical in economic terms given the unknown basic advances which will be coming down the pike.
When they came for the third-strikers who had stolen two bicycles and a pizza, I said nothing, for I don't steal either bicycles or pizza.
When they came for the cable descramblers I said nothing, because I don't watch cable.
When they came for the DeCSS sites I said nothing, because I have VHS and don't need DVDs.
When they came for my hard drive I said nothing, because my computer wouldn't let me.
Those who can, do
Those who can't do, teach
Those who can't teach, administrate
I think we see examples of both "can'ts" in this sorry situation.
Understood, but my point was that this kind of work can be done within the main CPU now instead of by specialty hardware. When your CPU is capable of doing Fourier transforms in realtime, f'cryinoutloud, why do you need specialty hardware? Why not do MIDI in software so you can upgrade without opening the box?
I don't understand what you think is missing in soundcards.
Surely this is like the color-depth thing mentioned earlier; once you are scanning and outputting CD-quality 44KHz stereo, what else is there to do? Most of the preprocessing done by early "kick-ass" soundcards is now redundant as it can be done more easily by software on the main CPU. How important is, say, realistic MIDI now when nearly everything is .mp3 and .wav (or functional equivalent)?
There is plenty of room for improvement before we have real-time photorealistic rendering of things like human faces and cloth. OTOH some of the VR problems are pretty much fully solved. I would think sound is one of these.
Contratulations, your brainwashing is now complete. For your next lesson, you will be expected to run up your credit cards buying a bunch of expensive shit you don't need.
Seriously, work is only like homework/busywork if you take that kind of job. If your goal in life is to put nose to grindstone, do 30 years at a Very Big Firm (tm) where you wear a suit and pay into your 401(k) so you can celebrate your heart attack by buying a fishing cottage, then be my guest. Not all of us want to live that way.
I work for a company that is big enough to be stable (they are a regional distributor of industrial equipment) but small enough that what I do -- mostly programming dinky proprietary controllers in proprietary languages -- is a very big deal. My job is project oriented and I have no supervision to speak of. I pretty much do damn well what I please and I get away with it because the stuff I put together works. (My employer has told me that we are the only firm in our industry doing this kind of work which has never been sued for non-performance.) When I say something shouldn't be done or won't work, we don't do it.
Some people need the structure of a heirarchal work environment, and some people are just miserable there. Some people need the structure of regular homework assignments in school, and some don't. Trying to press everyone into the same mold is a recipe for universal misery.
Fortunately, when I was in school my talents were well known so the cheating thing never came up, but the appropriate answer to such a challenge would be "Ask me anything. Right now." Anybody so foolish as to be unaware that superior performance is possible without make-work should not be passing judgement on actual students.
MASSIVE SYSTEM FAILURE
It was hilarious until I saw the effect it had on one poor woman who became almost frantically distraught as she thought she was responsible for breaking the then-$1000+ machine. It's harder to demonstrate your superiority to others by doing something useful, but much more rewarding in the end.
In any large city you have a huge population of folks who spend 1-2 hours a day commuting. During this time they can't watch TV (eyes on road, puh-leeze), can't surf the net (damn, forgot that extra-long extension cord, plus eyes on the road puh-leeze) but they can and will listen to the radio.
And while it is possible to hook your PC up to your stereo and listen through the net this really doesn't work too well unless you have broadband access, which most net users don't have either because it isn't available or they don't want to spend $50 a month. And most of the people who could do it don't realize what the possibilities are. I have quite a few acquaintances who have broadband access, but only one (other than me) has hooked his PC up to his stereo -- and he uses it for sound effects in the games he plays, not listening to streaming audio.
For the time being, and probably for at least 5-10 years, and longer in poor communities, radio will be an important medium. BTW, how long do you think it will be before dagummint decides net bandwidth is a limited resource which must be doled out selectively for our own benefit, eh?
Of course in those days most people didn't have home microcomputers on which to do this.
It is amazing what you can accomplish by including calls to short tasks in a big inner loop. While it's a bit harder to define your own state machine than it is to write a linear algorithm within a thread, it is SO much cleaner to debug and you can ensure the system is always in a known state when you need to do something.
With today's fast machines you can get away with stuff that would never have worked 10 years ago. At most in Windoze you might need ONE (1) extra thread to maintain the user interface, especially if you're using hoggy database tools instead of building your own files in an efficient manner. I have however updated flat sequential files of nearly a megabyte within single-threaded (don't laugh) VB apps (!) without noticeable UI glitches. Modern machines are just amazing. And that's not even to mention hauling an entire 5 or 10 megabyte array into RAM to do sorts and searches.
Whatever environment you are in, you probably don't need more than 2 threads, and if you think about it you can make one of them really, really simple so that you can fully debug it before you get to work on the other one. You can also temporarily haul your interthread comms out into the file system so you can actually run your threads as separate applications, each with its own debugger, before combining them into a single app. (Really, if you need tighter interthread communication than this allows, you probably don't need to be using separate threads.)
Just my $US0.02. But I write a lot of custom software which must run 24/7 and for which I am the only support staff, so I favor reliablility over all other considerations. I have started to write several threaded apps, but have never actually finished one. Unthreading them has always turned out to be easier than debugging the threads.
It is rather neat that they can "grow" these things without paying people to thread magnetic donuts with wire under binocular microscopes. Still, I'll be more impressed when they get a matrix hooked up and are using it to store and retrieve data.
If they do it it will be real interesting, because core storage was very robust. The magnetic particles aren't exposed to the outside world as they are on a disc. Even these very small ones would be well protected compared to the recording surface of a disk or CD.
CANDU ECCS systems also seem prone to "water hammer" which violently shakes the pipes when they are kicked in; in June 1974 the Pickering-A reactor blew out a gasket because of this, and because the detectors were clogged operators were unaware that a sump had flooded with radioactive water until major damage had been done.
Yeah, you said "well maintained" too, but in practice things keep happening that aren't supposed to happen. Experience doesn't seem to suggest that humans are capable of keeping things maintained to the standards that are necessary when the failure modes are so numerous and dramatic.
Anon:This is probably true. OTOH if you look at the normal case scenario a nuclear plant is by far the safest.
The safest method of dealing with dangerous energy levels is not to use dangerous energy levels. The best way to accomplish this is to increase efficiency and exercise frugality so you can subsist on the output of safer sources.
"By far the safest?" That really sounds like nuke-industry propaganda. Even such high-density sources as natural gas are considered cleaner and safer than nuclear. It's just that there is a limit to how much energy you can get from them. That's not even to mention "stereogreen" sources like solar, tidal, and geothermal, which of course are inherently limited both in their output density and their potential for catastrophic self-disassembly.
These particles are most dangerous because they can stay airborne for truly amazing lengths of time and are readily inhaled. Such particles lodge in the lungs, where one can continuously bombard several hundred cells with alpha particles for the rest of your life. The chances of one of them eventually turning cancerous are quite good.
The particles that don't get inhaled eventually either get eaten or get into the groundwater, which are not good fates but are significantly better than ending up in your lungs. The isotopes which are truly dangerous from ingestion methods other than inhalation are generally short-lived, so it doesn't matter quite so much if they get into the ocean or the groundwater or you eat some on your salad.
Simple. No system operated by human beings is always properly designed and properly run.
All systems which maintain a high energy density are dangerous. The higher the energy density, the more dangerous they are. Despite massive checks and controls we still get the occasional thing that "isn't supposed to happen," usually precisely because the system wasn't properly designed or operated.
When you look at worst-case scenarios achievable by the actions of angry or distracted operators and engineers, there is nothing humans do as dangerous as the use of nuclear energy. It is this that causes the problem; while coal, for example, may be overall as dangerous (a thin argument that ignores the relative reactivity of the emissions), it is the local increase in danger due to a malfunction which is much more limited with the chemical source.
No matter what you do to a coal plant, you can't do much more than destroy the plant itself and knock down a few buildings. An equivalent disaster with nuclear energy can kill thousands immediately, cause hundreds of thousands to die prematurely in the following years, and render hundreds of square miles of land uninhabitable to humans for the foreseeable future.
No, it's not supposed to happen. But things that aren't supposed to happen keep happening despite our best efforts. There is a lesson to be learned from that.
Gaming, like gambling, is an elaborate form of masturbation. Yes, it develops an extensive set of responses -- which, guess what, don't translate too well into the real world. (Remember how the narrator of Snow Crash had the coolest hangout possible in cyberspace but lived in a U-Stor-It in real life?)
Gaming is not about making you a better person, or even building a community -- the community thing happens by itself whenever a bunch of people get interested in the same thing. This is why you have a Linux community, a C community, a Sega community, a Nader community, a neighborhood community, a drug community, an HO scale train community, even a Lesbian S&M community.
Gaming itself is about pleasure. People play games because the games are simpler and make more sense and reward you more reliably for your effort than real life. As other people have pointed out here, the responses appropriate in a game environment -- make snap decisions, take risks, shoot at anything that moves, go for the reset button, cheat when necessary -- will get you into big trouble if you attempt to apply them in real life.
I'd say the #1 problem caused by games (but not just by games, also by other electronic media) is that they do not teach patience or perseverence or an extended span of attention. How many games reward you for sitting still for hours, being alert to your environment, and then acting on short notice with little warning when something unexpected happens? How many teach you that the sum of a thousand seemingly pointless boring tasks can be a single achievement, preceeded by no other reward at all, but making the whole effort worthwhile?
I grew up with computers and TV too, in an age when Jerry Mander was moved to write Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (all of which also apply to video games FWIW); in an age when the things Mander complained about were far milder than they are today, it took me years to unlearn a bunch of unhealthy patterns of behavior, and there are some impulses I doubt I'll ever shake.
Back in the dark ages when our parents had to walk to school in the snow (uphill both ways, remember) kids learned patience the hard way -- by being patient. There were long periods of time when there was no entertainment (or none of interest, e.g. nothing but soap operas on TV during summer afternoons), no companions, nothing structured to do; and you learned to deal with those times the way humans learn to deal with everything, by going through them and surviving. Some would turn to reading, some to working out, some to quiet inner contemplation, but most would figure out something interesting to do with a rainy afternoon. But now it seems like every waking moment can be engaged by some electronic companion. While this is a great convenience when we want it, it seems to me that the mental electric wheelchairs have taken over and people are forgetting that they have mental legs, too.
But I don't mean this to be a diatribe against games per se; they are now part of our environment and we will either adapt to their presence or (cough)fail to adapt(cough). It's just that the electronic / computer / gaming world needs its Pat Califia. This was just another tireless but tired advocacy job from the Marquis de Sade.
Every major advance in the last 40 years has been due to increases in clock speed and switch density. Cute tricks like caching and dual-piping or whatever they're calling it this year are flea bites on the butt of real progress. Remember what an "advance" the 486 was over the 386? The corporate boojums need things to market so they make things up when there's nothing real in the pipe, but when something real comes along it doesn't have to be marketed to you because you sure as damn hell notice it.
I mean, my relatively nonobsolte PIII is real cool, but would it really be that much cooler than a machine with 486-level architecture running at the same 450 MHz? For that matter I have to wonder how my tired old 8-bit friends would fare if one could run them at a good fraction of a GHz. Sure, you buy some extra clocks with all those extra transistors trying to second-guess look-ahead your code, but I wonder if that's the best use of all that high-speed silicon. Maybe a *cough* beowulf cluster */cough* of, say, Z80-level CPUs all fabbed on one chip and running at 1GHz could do some really interesting things by comparison.
If this thing is real then great for Intel and for us, it doesn't really matter what architecture they apply it to; and if it isn't real it won't save them when something that is does come along, not matter how good their press releases are.