In my experience, most coders simply aren't capable of thinking
threading through clearly
I agree completely, though you can expect to catch some flack for
that one, from the hoardes of poor coders who think nothing (or rather,
who don't think about the implications) of splitting off another thread
to boost performance (even in a single core environment).;-)
Personally, I consider myself a damned good coder - And I avoid
multithreading wherever possible. If I really need the raw CPU
power, I'll usually try to model it as a full slave process before
resorting to messy threading.
We desperately need higher-level threading primitives in computer science.
We've had it for decades - Just look for multiprocessor support, and
you have implicit multithreaded support automatically.
As one "mature" implementation, we could all start coding in HPF. I'd
personally rather gnaw my own right leg off, but, to each their own.
Might want to recheck the Digital Millenium Copyright Act
if you're living in the States - deliberately breaching copyright
protections such as exist on DVDs is indeed illegal.
What copy protections? I just fire up RipIt4Me, and a few minutes
later, I have a "repaired" DVD ready to burn. Don' no nuthin' 'bout
no "copy protections".
I do, however, consider it somewhat sad when we need to hope the
"interoperability" clause of the DMCA applies to playing the
damned things on the intended hardware.
If the author is the sole author and/or owns all the copyrights,
then they can do what ever they like.
They can do whatever they like in the future. And anyone
can take the entire GPL'd code base from the day before the license
change and tell the "owner" to go fork himself.
That in itself counts as one of the best reasons to use GPL'd
software - Eternal compatibility, as long as someone, anyone,
continues work on the older codebase (which may mean nothing more
than compiling it as-it-stands once every few years for any new OSs
that come to popularity).
On one hand it is suprising that Russia would want to arrest such a famous
person for such a trivial political act.
Although Kasparov has fame from a rather unusual source, do you really
think the same thing doesn't happen here in the US?
On the other hand, totalitarianism knows no friends..
If you protest without permission, you can expect to spend the night in the
county lock-up (or worse, but at least the rich n' famous can take some
comfort in the difficulty of "rendering" celebrities).
There may not be enough competition in the broadband market, but there's enough
that someone will say no to the RIAA and gain a significant competitive advantage
if they do.
Not to mention that most US broadband providers have limited regional monopolies
in exchange for universal access. If they start cutting people off,
they can expect a spanking first from the local PUCs and then from the class-action
lawyers. Wouldn't look all that pretty.
In this country, sometimes you can't even talk about the legitimacy of the income tax without being called un-American
Well, in fairness, I did (accidentally) overstate the sales tax. And I probably shouldn't have
mentioned payrole/SE taxes, since most people don't even realize (or want to know) that they
pay them.
Even so, ignoring sales tax and at the "average" tax rate for a single filer in the US - 29.1%
according to Wiki - Uncle Sam gets $1164 off the
movement of a $2000 laptop from point-A to point-B. And people would actually defend that
as somehow a "good" thing?
Ah well... I probably still would have gotten modded down. Most people really do seem to prefer
ignorace of the fact that, on average, after less than two transactions a given dollar usually
ends up back in the government's coffers.
No biggie, my karma can stand it, but thanks for the word of support.:)
That's misleading, as it implies that Japan is just one of many countries a) with
socialized medicine, and b) less taxes collected.
I didn't mean it to sound misleading, more as a proof-of-concept. If they can do
it, why can't the US?
NYC sales tax is 8.375%, not 10+%.
Really? Hmm, I have to admit my error there.
My larger point, however, remains - A simple personal property sale between two upper
middle class people (enough to approach the highest tax bracket, not enough to have
any real tax shelters), if viewed as "income" for the seller, will result in
federal+state+local taxes quite possibly more than the total transaction price.
Sooo if i sell everything as an 'official' loss, i guess their tactic will backfire.
Actually, you make a damned good point!
If the IRS wants to classify EBay as self-employment income, you get to deduct your costs. For those
using EBay as a primary source of income, that would have the desired effect; For those who just want
to get rid of trash in their attic however, selling at a considerable loss compared to the original
purchase price, this could really come back to bite the IRS hard.
Of course, that would presume we actually have a fair system (don'tcha just love all the lines on
your tax forms that say "If negative, enter a zero"?).
Let's look at this mathematically, considering me buying a $2000 laptop
from you on EBay...
The money with which I pay for that laptop already had up to 50% taken out
for income tax (including either payroll or SE taxes, which everyone seems
to forget Uncle Sam collects and adds roughly 15% on top of the supposed
35% highest tax bracket - Remind me again why we don't have socialized
healthcare, when countries like Japan can manage it on only two-thirds the
taxes?).
You paid up to 10% sales tax on the laptop in the first place (it actually
goes higher in some places, but I'll presume neither of us live in NYC).
For simplicity, let's presume you just want to get rid of it at par, not
even make a profit.
My state (and many others) expects me to declare "use" tax on goods bought
online. No one actually pays that, but in theory, another 10% to
Big Brother's coffers.
Then you get to pay up to that same 50% on your income taxes for
the laptop.
So, in the simple transaction of you sending me a laptop and me sending you
$2k, The government manages to get up to... $2,200!!!
If you don't see the problem there, Thomas Jefferson may as well have
never existed.
No. Mock indignation, so everyone can try to look "less racist" than everyone
else.
Even his worst detractors don't seriously consider him a racist - Just another
shock-jock using racially-charged language to make a buck.
Just as racist, just as misogynistic, just as insensitive.
C'mon, hasn't Chris Rock taught you anything? We show racial insensitivity. They
(and it doesn't matter which "they" you refer to), as a repressed minority, subvert our vitriol to
sardonically weaken our merciless blows.
Gimme a break. I thought the left at least gave lip service to freedom of speech
Nah, the right pretends to care about the bill of rights. The left pretends to care
about "the children". Neither really does, of course, but let's get our pack-delusions
straight here.;-)
And FTR, I don't listen to his show (though I have left it perhaps three or four times while scanning channels,
to listen to one of his guests)
Where did you get the idea that there are "no philosophical
implications"?
Okay, let me rephrase that... "No philosophical implications without
invoking some flakey new-agey pseudoscientific BS". I actually had
(something like) that as as my original phrasing, but decided to give
you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't mean anything so fluffy.
My apologies for overestimating your intended meaning.
The mind-body problem is a huge question in philosophy.
True, but not for reasons related to the mechanism by which our
brains work. Hoffstadter made IMO the best illustration of this issue
by pointing out that whether our minds work as an electrochemical neural
net, a pheromone driven ant colony, or an arena of shiny yellow magnetic
marbles, we'd observe the same high-level phenomena. And that
forms the area of interest to philosophy, the high-level phenomena,
not the gears or neurons or ants or photons.
Even from the epistemological POV, knowing whether we use quantum
effects or not only rephrases the question, rather than providing
any sort of functional answer. How do we know something at
a conscious level - Because we translate quantum vacuum fluctuations
into thoughts? Sorry, but greenness dissolves.
Did you pull this out your ass. Let me guess, you had to read Plato
your first year of college and that makes you an expert in philosophy.
Wow, great ad hominem. I guess that settles the issue, eh
Aristotle? And you know me so well! Amazing. Do I have a
stalker in you?
And puh-lease! By college I had already moved on to Husserl and Nietzsche
with a bit of Jung thrown in for good measure.
Understanding where how consciousness relates to the brain will give
us new incite into this philosophical problem.
No, it most certainly won't. Invoking spooky quantum mojo as
an answer has all the credibility of saying "god did it" - And as I
mentioned, I already covered Nietzsche.
There are probably a lot of functions like photosynthesis that
rely on quantum effects.
Like, say, "Color" (or more accurately, radiative/absorbtive
wavelength) in general, a completely quantum phenomenon.
TFA does a poor job of mentioning this, but the fact that plants
use quantum effects doesn't exactly count as a "new" discovery.
Only the level of detail of our understanding of the
transfer lacks completeness.
To put the "newness" of this discovery another way (FTA):
This
wavelike characteristic can explain the extreme efficiency of the
energy transfer because it enables the system to simultaneously sample
all the potential energy pathways and choose the most efficient
one.
Or in other words, "water flows downhill by trying
every direction at once and the most downhill-like one wins". We
just need to figure out how to make water that tries every
direction at once.
If self awareness is enabled through some sort of quantum effect,
imagine the philosophical implications.
Yes, human consciousness might well involve some quantum phenomena...
But that has no philosophical implications - It just makes us
better computers than we thought.
In their favor are the facts that they're powered by
USB (you can just plug one in and go, sans supply)
Although that might seem better, I would call that a
showstoppingly critical design flaw.
USB allows for half a Watt for powered devices. A HDD
spinning up can easily draw over 20W. Most USB controllers will
handle quite a lot more than the spec'd 0.5W, but 40x more
really pushes your luck. A good MB should just shut down
that channel. A bad MB might simply cook.
RPGs were getting better and better because the ability to make them
more appealing - graphically, sound (voice quality, etc) were improving.
Yes and no...
As a point of reference, I would guess that we can probably agree that
FF7 represented the high-point of console RPGs, for which it owes an
enormous debt to the graphics capabilities of the PSX. At the same
time, though, it had quite a powerful story behind it that would
have made it still turn out a huge success even if Square had made
it for the SNES using mere sprite-based graphics.
Which we can compare with earlier and later works... Although Square didn't
release most of the best SNES FFs in the US, they did show off their
art at the time with a US release of Chrono Trigger, arguably the best
2d console RPG ever made in English (though I'll grant that a few of the
Japanese-only releases match it - Thank god for the likes of DeJap and
Aeon Genesis!). On the other side of the coin, even before the end of
the original PSX era, later RPGs had already started to focus on graphics
at the expense of plot - I'd point to FF9 as perhaps the best example of
this. Although it had an okay story as the backdrop, most of the actual
gameplay either railroaded the player to the point of frustration or left
everything so wide open that I actually had to consult a strategy guide
more than once to figure out what the hell to do to advance the plot (and
I tend to play in a manner such that I have practically written a
strategy guide by the end, so that says something).
I do agree with you that MMORPGs seem to have taken over as a sort
of cop-out to coming up with a good plot, but I don't even blame them
for striking the first blow. Pretty graphics killed gameplay long
before the first "M" in "MMORPG" became practical.
What would it take for a great single-player RPG now? A game so
enjoyable that it overshadows the enjoyment factor of playing a similar
game with hundreds of others. Humans are social creatures, by and large,
so that will be very tough to do.
Social creatures, yes, but don't leave out the "G" part of "RPG". I
believe the difference rests in the idea of "role playing" vs
"interactive fiction". I can go to a Renny Faire and role-play
(by which I mean assuming a role, not playing D&D); But I don't get to
play out an escapist fantasy story as the hero.
July 1947: A "weather balloon" crashes in Roswell, NM.
December 1947: Bell Labs' Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley
"invent" the transistor, using boron-doped silicon, which Bell
Labs didn't have the equipment to produce at that time!
It's worth knowing about basics of a running program like the
program counter, but making much use of assembler is for most
programmers a waste of time.
Let me give you a simple example: Pipelining.
The Pentium MMX had two integer execution pipelines. Let's take
a simple highly-sequential toy function that you intend to call
repeatedly: void f(int *a){
int b,c,...y,z;
b = *a + 1;
c = b * 3; ...
y = w >> 2;
z = y + 7;
*a = z;
}
That would run in time X. Two calls would run in time 2X.
Now, consider the following variation:
int f(int *a1, int *a2){
int b1,c1,...y1,z1;
int b2,c2,...y2,z2;
b1 = *a1 + 1; *b2 = a2 + 1;
c1 = b1 * 3; c2 = b2 * 3; ...
y1 = w1 >> 2; y2 = w2 >> 2;
z1 = y1 + 7; z2 = y2 + 7;
*a1 = z1; *a2 = z2;
}
One pass of that would do twice the work of the first version,
yet still take roughly time X.
Actually it gets a bit more complicated than that, since on
the original Pentium MMX, you'd hit a bunch of AGIs in both
versions; You'd have only half the overhead of the function call
itself, but since only one mult or shift could issue per clock
(with mults taking three clocks), you might need to pad with a few
NOPs to optimize the instruction interleaving.
But aside from the cycle-by-cycle specifics of how those two functions
would perform, NO compiler would ever translate the first version
into the second version, because that would require not just knowing
what you did, but why. I also deliberately gave that
example in C rather than ASM, to illustrate that even though I might
write purely in C, understanding both what the compiler turns it into
and how that code will actually run makes a world of difference to
execution speed.
What I find not surprising about the article's conclusions is even in the computer
professional world I've met many "whizzes" not much more intelligent about what computers
are and how they work.
Why, even here on Slashdot, in the occasional "Ask Slashdot" about whether a
CS major should bother to learn assembly, you'll get a large number of
willfully-ignorant reponses amounting to "no, you don't need to know how
the computer works, and the compiler can optimize better than you anyway".;-)
/ Learned ASM before C // But after Basic (hangs head in shame)
If you're not renegotiating with your cellular and broadband carriers when the
contract comes close to ending, you're unwise.
whawhaWhat???
I've had the same cell carrier for about 3 years now. They still offer roughly the same plan
I have for the same price (I think my "evening hours" could start an hour earlier if I renegotiated,
nothing else obviously different).
By NOT renegotiating, I get the same deal as you would if you signed up today, except if
my company starts neglecting service in my area, I can drop them tomorrow with no penalty.
So what possible incentive do I have to ask them to stick me with another two-year contract?
Don't want to pay a fee? Don't sign up
While that sounds good in theory, in practice it amounts to saying "you don't need
cable/electric/phone/ISP, so don't sign up". I have exactly one choice for cable and
electric, one choice for landline phone (which somewhat supports your statement but
don't miss the point) I did skip and only have a cell phone. I have two choices for
ISP - Cable or DSL. Saying "Don't sign up" really doesn't exist as an option, and the
local-monopolist scum fully well know that.
The business is very competitive, and there are lots of incentives to switch carriers.
Competitive??? Sorry, my bad - I must have erred in presuming you as an American. Where
do you live, that you actually have a real choice of service providers?
I'm going to be installing that PDF-downloader extension just
as soon as I'm done mocking this list for sucking so hard.
That one counts as "bad" for its own special reason - Namely, you
don't need it.
To get the same effect, just open Acrobat and in the preferences,
uncheck "Display PDF in Browser". I also uncheck "Check Browser",
"Allow Fast Web View", and "Allow Background Downloading", but you
really only need the first one (the exact setting names might vary
between versions, but I know firsthand that they exist in some form
in every version from 5 to 8)).
For good measure, I also delete all occurences of "nppdf32.dll"
on my systems, because Acrobat has a habit of changing its own
settings to what it likes rather than what the user likes;
but in theory, you shouldn't need to to that.
For example, NoScript, which does make Firefox safer, but isn't
worth the hassle
Says who?
Well, not so much in that it doesn't work, but rather, that much
better alternatives exist.
Personally, I use QuickJava, which makes enabling/disabling Java
and Javascript (separately) just a matter of clicking an icon at the
bottom of the window. So I can keep it off 99% of the time, and on
the rare occasion that I need Java, I can just whack the button and
instantly have it enabled.
Even then, though, you could argue that FireFox makes it easy enough
to change those from the Options pane. Personally I find it useful
to have a one-click toggle, but YMMV.
Simple - The "access" they wish to block, they don't control.
If they want to test the integrity of their program and its memory,
fine. If they want to TOS people for certain behaviors, fine. But
they don't own my keyboard, mouse, joystick, or OS. If I want
to run a program to stuff my keyboard buffer, Blizzard has NO
right to do a goddamned thing about it other than ban my account.
They don't have the right to run spyware on my machine, they certainly
don't have the right to actively kill processes or delete files, and
trying to invoke the DMCA boogeyman, well, I can't wait for
that one to get laughed out of court.
Hard to see how they have it wrong? No, hard to see how they can
make such claims without bursting into laughter halfway through.
Let's see, for this site I'll use the name... (consults the AD&D naming tables) Pedro AxeLayer. I
live at 123 main st, in whatever town the site's owner lives. I, by some amazing coincidence, have the same
phone number as the site's local police.
I will make an account on a site to give myself "persistant" in-context credibility (as with "pla" here on
Slashdot), but I simply don't give out my real contact info. I don't even give that to most companies with
whom I do business - They need a way to bill me and nothing else.
Now, I harbor no delusions that I have "real" anonymity - Of course someone sufficiently motivated
could track me down IRL. But I can sure as hell make it difficult, as well as providing myself a layer of
plausible deniability for most purposes ("Someone with the same username as my email address insulted your
favorite sports team? Why, what a coincidence, Mr. Boss! I'll have to contact the site admin and see if
they can get that username revoked, ASAP!"). Anyone who chooses to befriend me here on Slashdot does so
based entirely on what I say. Not my name, race, age, gender, location, height, or weight. And I
consider that a "good" thing (though for the record, I don't count as unusual in any of the preceeding list).
As for bloggers... I've said it before (and lost karma) and I'll say it again (and probably lose more
karma) - Who cares? Make all the rules you want. It still won't make you "real" journalists (With some
notable exceptions, of course, but the rest of you angsty teens and cat-lovers, don't kid yourself - No
one cares what Fluffy dragged in today).
There are many large business models that depend on it.
Such as?
First, what does a networking potocol have to do with a business model; And
second, how can any company survive with a business model dependant on something
not supported by most ISPs?
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, most coders simply aren't capable of thinking threading through clearly
;-)
I agree completely, though you can expect to catch some flack for that one, from the hoardes of poor coders who think nothing (or rather, who don't think about the implications) of splitting off another thread to boost performance (even in a single core environment).
Personally, I consider myself a damned good coder - And I avoid multithreading wherever possible. If I really need the raw CPU power, I'll usually try to model it as a full slave process before resorting to messy threading.
We desperately need higher-level threading primitives in computer science.
We've had it for decades - Just look for multiprocessor support, and you have implicit multithreaded support automatically.
As one "mature" implementation, we could all start coding in HPF. I'd personally rather gnaw my own right leg off, but, to each their own.
Might want to recheck the Digital Millenium Copyright Act if you're living in the States - deliberately breaching copyright protections such as exist on DVDs is indeed illegal.
What copy protections? I just fire up RipIt4Me, and a few minutes later, I have a "repaired" DVD ready to burn. Don' no nuthin' 'bout no "copy protections".
I do, however, consider it somewhat sad when we need to hope the "interoperability" clause of the DMCA applies to playing the damned things on the intended hardware.
If the author is the sole author and/or owns all the copyrights, then they can do what ever they like.
They can do whatever they like in the future. And anyone can take the entire GPL'd code base from the day before the license change and tell the "owner" to go fork himself.
That in itself counts as one of the best reasons to use GPL'd software - Eternal compatibility, as long as someone, anyone, continues work on the older codebase (which may mean nothing more than compiling it as-it-stands once every few years for any new OSs that come to popularity).
On one hand it is suprising that Russia would want to arrest such a famous person for such a trivial political act.
Although Kasparov has fame from a rather unusual source, do you really think the same thing doesn't happen here in the US?
On the other hand, totalitarianism knows no friends..
If you protest without permission, you can expect to spend the night in the county lock-up (or worse, but at least the rich n' famous can take some comfort in the difficulty of "rendering" celebrities).
1) Spell "Asimov" correctly when submitting an article to Slashdot.
2) The military will program their toys to kill everything and everything, and to hell with Asimov (right up until they turn on us)
3) Humans already count as collateral damage in warfare. Damn the men, spare the oilfields!
There may not be enough competition in the broadband market, but there's enough that someone will say no to the RIAA and gain a significant competitive advantage if they do.
Not to mention that most US broadband providers have limited regional monopolies in exchange for universal access. If they start cutting people off, they can expect a spanking first from the local PUCs and then from the class-action lawyers. Wouldn't look all that pretty.
In this country, sometimes you can't even talk about the legitimacy of the income tax without being called un-American
:)
Well, in fairness, I did (accidentally) overstate the sales tax. And I probably shouldn't have mentioned payrole/SE taxes, since most people don't even realize (or want to know) that they pay them.
Even so, ignoring sales tax and at the "average" tax rate for a single filer in the US - 29.1% according to Wiki - Uncle Sam gets $1164 off the movement of a $2000 laptop from point-A to point-B. And people would actually defend that as somehow a "good" thing?
Ah well... I probably still would have gotten modded down. Most people really do seem to prefer ignorace of the fact that, on average, after less than two transactions a given dollar usually ends up back in the government's coffers.
No biggie, my karma can stand it, but thanks for the word of support.
That's misleading, as it implies that Japan is just one of many countries a) with socialized medicine, and b) less taxes collected.
I didn't mean it to sound misleading, more as a proof-of-concept. If they can do it, why can't the US?
NYC sales tax is 8.375%, not 10+%.
Really? Hmm, I have to admit my error there.
My larger point, however, remains - A simple personal property sale between two upper middle class people (enough to approach the highest tax bracket, not enough to have any real tax shelters), if viewed as "income" for the seller, will result in federal+state+local taxes quite possibly more than the total transaction price.
Sooo if i sell everything as an 'official' loss, i guess their tactic will backfire.
Actually, you make a damned good point!
If the IRS wants to classify EBay as self-employment income, you get to deduct your costs. For those using EBay as a primary source of income, that would have the desired effect; For those who just want to get rid of trash in their attic however, selling at a considerable loss compared to the original purchase price, this could really come back to bite the IRS hard.
Of course, that would presume we actually have a fair system (don'tcha just love all the lines on your tax forms that say "If negative, enter a zero"?).
A sale is a sale and income is income.
No.
Let's look at this mathematically, considering me buying a $2000 laptop from you on EBay...
The money with which I pay for that laptop already had up to 50% taken out for income tax (including either payroll or SE taxes, which everyone seems to forget Uncle Sam collects and adds roughly 15% on top of the supposed 35% highest tax bracket - Remind me again why we don't have socialized healthcare, when countries like Japan can manage it on only two-thirds the taxes?).
You paid up to 10% sales tax on the laptop in the first place (it actually goes higher in some places, but I'll presume neither of us live in NYC). For simplicity, let's presume you just want to get rid of it at par, not even make a profit.
My state (and many others) expects me to declare "use" tax on goods bought online. No one actually pays that, but in theory, another 10% to Big Brother's coffers.
Then you get to pay up to that same 50% on your income taxes for the laptop.
So, in the simple transaction of you sending me a laptop and me sending you $2k, The government manages to get up to... $2,200!!!
If you don't see the problem there, Thomas Jefferson may as well have never existed.
Moral outrage
;-)
No. Mock indignation, so everyone can try to look "less racist" than everyone else.
Even his worst detractors don't seriously consider him a racist - Just another shock-jock using racially-charged language to make a buck.
Just as racist, just as misogynistic, just as insensitive.
C'mon, hasn't Chris Rock taught you anything? We show racial insensitivity. They (and it doesn't matter which "they" you refer to), as a repressed minority, subvert our vitriol to sardonically weaken our merciless blows.
Gimme a break. I thought the left at least gave lip service to freedom of speech
Nah, the right pretends to care about the bill of rights. The left pretends to care about "the children". Neither really does, of course, but let's get our pack-delusions straight here.
And FTR, I don't listen to his show (though I have left it perhaps three or four times while scanning channels, to listen to one of his guests)
I don't care if I get modded a troll.
...Thus you posted as an AC?
Where did you get the idea that there are "no philosophical implications"?
Okay, let me rephrase that... "No philosophical implications without invoking some flakey new-agey pseudoscientific BS". I actually had (something like) that as as my original phrasing, but decided to give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't mean anything so fluffy. My apologies for overestimating your intended meaning.
The mind-body problem is a huge question in philosophy.
True, but not for reasons related to the mechanism by which our brains work. Hoffstadter made IMO the best illustration of this issue by pointing out that whether our minds work as an electrochemical neural net, a pheromone driven ant colony, or an arena of shiny yellow magnetic marbles, we'd observe the same high-level phenomena. And that forms the area of interest to philosophy, the high-level phenomena, not the gears or neurons or ants or photons.
Even from the epistemological POV, knowing whether we use quantum effects or not only rephrases the question, rather than providing any sort of functional answer. How do we know something at a conscious level - Because we translate quantum vacuum fluctuations into thoughts? Sorry, but greenness dissolves.
Did you pull this out your ass. Let me guess, you had to read Plato your first year of college and that makes you an expert in philosophy.
Wow, great ad hominem. I guess that settles the issue, eh Aristotle? And you know me so well! Amazing. Do I have a stalker in you?
And puh-lease! By college I had already moved on to Husserl and Nietzsche with a bit of Jung thrown in for good measure.
Understanding where how consciousness relates to the brain will give us new incite into this philosophical problem.
No, it most certainly won't. Invoking spooky quantum mojo as an answer has all the credibility of saying "god did it" - And as I mentioned, I already covered Nietzsche.
Like, say, "Color" (or more accurately, radiative/absorbtive wavelength) in general, a completely quantum phenomenon.
TFA does a poor job of mentioning this, but the fact that plants use quantum effects doesn't exactly count as a "new" discovery. Only the level of detail of our understanding of the transfer lacks completeness.
To put the "newness" of this discovery another way (FTA):Or in other words, "water flows downhill by trying every direction at once and the most downhill-like one wins". We just need to figure out how to make water that tries every direction at once.
If self awareness is enabled through some sort of quantum effect, imagine the philosophical implications.
Yes, human consciousness might well involve some quantum phenomena... But that has no philosophical implications - It just makes us better computers than we thought.
In their favor are the facts that they're powered by USB (you can just plug one in and go, sans supply)
Although that might seem better, I would call that a showstoppingly critical design flaw.
USB allows for half a Watt for powered devices. A HDD spinning up can easily draw over 20W. Most USB controllers will handle quite a lot more than the spec'd 0.5W, but 40x more really pushes your luck. A good MB should just shut down that channel. A bad MB might simply cook.
RPGs were getting better and better because the ability to make them more appealing - graphically, sound (voice quality, etc) were improving.
Yes and no...
As a point of reference, I would guess that we can probably agree that FF7 represented the high-point of console RPGs, for which it owes an enormous debt to the graphics capabilities of the PSX. At the same time, though, it had quite a powerful story behind it that would have made it still turn out a huge success even if Square had made it for the SNES using mere sprite-based graphics.
Which we can compare with earlier and later works... Although Square didn't release most of the best SNES FFs in the US, they did show off their art at the time with a US release of Chrono Trigger, arguably the best 2d console RPG ever made in English (though I'll grant that a few of the Japanese-only releases match it - Thank god for the likes of DeJap and Aeon Genesis!). On the other side of the coin, even before the end of the original PSX era, later RPGs had already started to focus on graphics at the expense of plot - I'd point to FF9 as perhaps the best example of this. Although it had an okay story as the backdrop, most of the actual gameplay either railroaded the player to the point of frustration or left everything so wide open that I actually had to consult a strategy guide more than once to figure out what the hell to do to advance the plot (and I tend to play in a manner such that I have practically written a strategy guide by the end, so that says something).
I do agree with you that MMORPGs seem to have taken over as a sort of cop-out to coming up with a good plot, but I don't even blame them for striking the first blow. Pretty graphics killed gameplay long before the first "M" in "MMORPG" became practical.
What would it take for a great single-player RPG now? A game so enjoyable that it overshadows the enjoyment factor of playing a similar game with hundreds of others. Humans are social creatures, by and large, so that will be very tough to do.
Social creatures, yes, but don't leave out the "G" part of "RPG". I believe the difference rests in the idea of "role playing" vs "interactive fiction". I can go to a Renny Faire and role-play (by which I mean assuming a role, not playing D&D); But I don't get to play out an escapist fantasy story as the hero.
It was scary stuff, radically advanced
;-)
July 1947: A "weather balloon" crashes in Roswell, NM.
December 1947: Bell Labs' Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley "invent" the transistor, using boron-doped silicon, which Bell Labs didn't have the equipment to produce at that time!
Spoooooooky.
It's worth knowing about basics of a running program like the program counter, but making much use of assembler is for most programmers a waste of time.
...
...
Let me give you a simple example: Pipelining.
The Pentium MMX had two integer execution pipelines. Let's take a simple highly-sequential toy function that you intend to call repeatedly:
void f(int *a){
int b,c,...y,z;
b = *a + 1;
c = b * 3;
y = w >> 2;
z = y + 7;
*a = z;
}
That would run in time X. Two calls would run in time 2X.
Now, consider the following variation:
int f(int *a1, int *a2){
int b1,c1,...y1,z1;
int b2,c2,...y2,z2;
b1 = *a1 + 1; *b2 = a2 + 1;
c1 = b1 * 3; c2 = b2 * 3;
y1 = w1 >> 2; y2 = w2 >> 2;
z1 = y1 + 7; z2 = y2 + 7;
*a1 = z1; *a2 = z2;
}
One pass of that would do twice the work of the first version, yet still take roughly time X.
Actually it gets a bit more complicated than that, since on the original Pentium MMX, you'd hit a bunch of AGIs in both versions; You'd have only half the overhead of the function call itself, but since only one mult or shift could issue per clock (with mults taking three clocks), you might need to pad with a few NOPs to optimize the instruction interleaving.
But aside from the cycle-by-cycle specifics of how those two functions would perform, NO compiler would ever translate the first version into the second version, because that would require not just knowing what you did, but why. I also deliberately gave that example in C rather than ASM, to illustrate that even though I might write purely in C, understanding both what the compiler turns it into and how that code will actually run makes a world of difference to execution speed.
What I find not surprising about the article's conclusions is even in the computer professional world I've met many "whizzes" not much more intelligent about what computers are and how they work.
;-)
// But after Basic (hangs head in shame)
Why, even here on Slashdot, in the occasional "Ask Slashdot" about whether a CS major should bother to learn assembly, you'll get a large number of willfully-ignorant reponses amounting to "no, you don't need to know how the computer works, and the compiler can optimize better than you anyway".
/ Learned ASM before C
If you're not renegotiating with your cellular and broadband carriers when the contract comes close to ending, you're unwise.
whawha What???
I've had the same cell carrier for about 3 years now. They still offer roughly the same plan I have for the same price (I think my "evening hours" could start an hour earlier if I renegotiated, nothing else obviously different).
By NOT renegotiating, I get the same deal as you would if you signed up today, except if my company starts neglecting service in my area, I can drop them tomorrow with no penalty.
So what possible incentive do I have to ask them to stick me with another two-year contract?
Don't want to pay a fee? Don't sign up
While that sounds good in theory, in practice it amounts to saying "you don't need cable/electric/phone/ISP, so don't sign up". I have exactly one choice for cable and electric, one choice for landline phone (which somewhat supports your statement but don't miss the point) I did skip and only have a cell phone. I have two choices for ISP - Cable or DSL. Saying "Don't sign up" really doesn't exist as an option, and the local-monopolist scum fully well know that.
The business is very competitive, and there are lots of incentives to switch carriers.
Competitive??? Sorry, my bad - I must have erred in presuming you as an American. Where do you live, that you actually have a real choice of service providers?
I'm going to be installing that PDF-downloader extension just as soon as I'm done mocking this list for sucking so hard.
That one counts as "bad" for its own special reason - Namely, you don't need it.
To get the same effect, just open Acrobat and in the preferences, uncheck "Display PDF in Browser". I also uncheck "Check Browser", "Allow Fast Web View", and "Allow Background Downloading", but you really only need the first one (the exact setting names might vary between versions, but I know firsthand that they exist in some form in every version from 5 to 8)).
For good measure, I also delete all occurences of "nppdf32.dll" on my systems, because Acrobat has a habit of changing its own settings to what it likes rather than what the user likes; but in theory, you shouldn't need to to that.
For example, NoScript, which does make Firefox safer, but isn't worth the hassle
Says who?
Well, not so much in that it doesn't work, but rather, that much better alternatives exist.
Personally, I use QuickJava, which makes enabling/disabling Java and Javascript (separately) just a matter of clicking an icon at the bottom of the window. So I can keep it off 99% of the time, and on the rare occasion that I need Java, I can just whack the button and instantly have it enabled.
Even then, though, you could argue that FireFox makes it easy enough to change those from the Options pane. Personally I find it useful to have a one-click toggle, but YMMV.
And it's hard to see how they're wrong in that
Simple - The "access" they wish to block, they don't control.
If they want to test the integrity of their program and its memory, fine. If they want to TOS people for certain behaviors, fine. But they don't own my keyboard, mouse, joystick, or OS. If I want to run a program to stuff my keyboard buffer, Blizzard has NO right to do a goddamned thing about it other than ban my account. They don't have the right to run spyware on my machine, they certainly don't have the right to actively kill processes or delete files, and trying to invoke the DMCA boogeyman, well, I can't wait for that one to get laughed out of court.
Hard to see how they have it wrong? No, hard to see how they can make such claims without bursting into laughter halfway through.
Let's see, for this site I'll use the name... (consults the AD&D naming tables) Pedro AxeLayer. I live at 123 main st, in whatever town the site's owner lives. I, by some amazing coincidence, have the same phone number as the site's local police.
I will make an account on a site to give myself "persistant" in-context credibility (as with "pla" here on Slashdot), but I simply don't give out my real contact info. I don't even give that to most companies with whom I do business - They need a way to bill me and nothing else.
Now, I harbor no delusions that I have "real" anonymity - Of course someone sufficiently motivated could track me down IRL. But I can sure as hell make it difficult, as well as providing myself a layer of plausible deniability for most purposes ("Someone with the same username as my email address insulted your favorite sports team? Why, what a coincidence, Mr. Boss! I'll have to contact the site admin and see if they can get that username revoked, ASAP!"). Anyone who chooses to befriend me here on Slashdot does so based entirely on what I say. Not my name, race, age, gender, location, height, or weight. And I consider that a "good" thing (though for the record, I don't count as unusual in any of the preceeding list).
As for bloggers... I've said it before (and lost karma) and I'll say it again (and probably lose more karma) - Who cares? Make all the rules you want. It still won't make you "real" journalists (With some notable exceptions, of course, but the rest of you angsty teens and cat-lovers, don't kid yourself - No one cares what Fluffy dragged in today).
There are many large business models that depend on it.
Such as?
First, what does a networking potocol have to do with a business model; And second, how can any company survive with a business model dependant on something not supported by most ISPs?
Serious questions, not sarcasm.
All that's happened is that finally you've been chosen for shipment to Cuba
;-)
// I think...
Yeah, but that represents a real threat, since we have more people in Guantanimo than BeOS/Zeta has users.
/ joking, for the humor impaired.