I received better medical care under in the UK as a foreign student than I ever did in America, despite having an impressively comprehensive health insurance plan.
IIRC, isn't ray-tracing something that CPUs do better than GPUs?
If we actually do make the transition to ray-tracing, won't the logical solution be to simply have a CPU with more cores?
There are a few interesting developments at hand (GPGPUs, CPUs with on-die GPUs, etc....). We might have to wait a bit to see how these things play out.
Maybe it's not as simple as "winning" or "losing"?
The primary objective seems to have been to get Saddam and his government out. We 'won' that part.
Unfortunately, nobody planned for what came after that. You could argye that we've been "losing" ever since, and might never "win" without resorting to genocide. (Similarly, admitting a loss isn't exactly the same thing as losing)
Look at the Israel/Palestine conflict. Nobody is ever going to walk away from that as the clearly-defined "winner"
The flu's a virus. We've only had the facilities to treat the actual virus itself for a very short time (and even then, they're somewhat rarely used).
However, we've had the tools to treat the symptoms for quite some time. I don't doubt that they were considerably more primitive in 1918, although even the most basic treatments could mean the difference between life and death.
Strictly speaking, the concentration of people on the ground is going to be much, much lower, and you always have the opportunity to run like hell (as opposed to being trapped on an upper floor, where you have literally no options)
If I got word that a hijacked airliner was heading for NYC, I'd want to get as far away from any tall buildings as humanly possible.
My question is, why the hell were they flying so low? They HAD to have known this would cause a scare!
I remember last summer feeling a huge rattling in my office building in Newport News, VA, to look out the window to see a 747 with a US flag painted across its tail pass by just a few hundred feet above. (This was also notable, because I'm pretty certain that the building is in restricted airspace)
This repeated two or three times more. Apparently it's normal for Air Force 1 to fly at ridiculously low altitudes (below radar?)
AFAIK, the only 747s operated by the US Government with that paint scheme are operated as Air Force 1.
You'll have to forgive my mild sarcasm, but isn't the singularity something that only exists in the context of New York Times editorials?
If we want to consider Google as part of the so-called singularity, bits such as this insight are worrying:
One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. "That's troubling to me," Ms. Mayer says. "Good students are good at all things."
Where's the space for normal folks? I pride myself upon having a broad range of interests, but quake in terror at the idea that a candidate who received a C in a subject distantly related to his field isn't even considered.
Although it's become trendy to blame the Gaussian Copula function for the collapse of the bond market, I wouldn't be so quick to judge.
The function appears to have allowed investors to "re-package" risky debts to appear less risky by the system that was used to rate the bonds, which (very predictably) blew up in everybody's face when it came time to pay off the loans.
However, the "white-hat/black-hat" argument comes to mind. Although the exploit was bad, it seems as though somebody should have stepped in and fixed the bond rating system so that it could no longer be abused and manipulated.
Because 4.7GiB of bandwidth can be more expensive than the approx. $1 in two-way shipping that it costs to place the disc in the mail, and not everybody has a network connection able to stream those quantities of data.
Bandwidth might not be as expensive as Time Warner and co. are making it out to be, though it certainly isn't free.
Hell. 42 cents (or whatever it is now) is still a good deal for sending a letter across Manhattan, let alone the country.
Having lived in Alaska, I can also attest to the fact that their economy could very well collapse if the USPS withdrew from the area. 42 cents for a letter is damn cheap, considering how exorbitantly expensive it is to ship anything larger.
Also remember that packages typically have to cross international borders twice to get there. Shipping via cargo ship is in murkier waters, but nevertheless requires you to switch modes of transportation twice as well.
There is no railroad link between Alaska and the US/Canadian railroad network. The roads into Alaska don't follow the most direct/efficient route, and also tend to be avoided as a result. Virtually all freight arrives by air, sea, or rail barge. The capital, Juneau, isn't even connected to the road network.
Have you actually followed the development of Mac OS X since 10.0?
I have, and it is indeed true that the "eye candy" has improved with each release. However, each release has also loaded progressively more UI feature to the GPU from the CPU, which has generally resulted in a faster user experience, even on old hardware (I still regularly use a 450MHz G4 from 10 years ago -- it's surprisingly usable).
Some of the more flashy bits of eye candy gracefully degrade, and automatically disable themselves if your graphics card is too slow to adequately display the effect.
There are plenty of things that I can criticize apple for. Leopard is arguably the least stable *nix system I've touched, and made a few UI changes that felt like a step backward. However, it's disingenuous to criticize apple for improving eye candy without mentioning the (negligible) effect on performance that it had.
In fact, research has indicated that aesthetics have a huge effect on usability, even if the interfaces are otherwise identical.
Intersting -- I haven't completely read up on this, but I presume that operating in the non-superconducting region limits your pulse length of the FEL to something rather short compared to what could be achieved with a superconducting accelerator?
I remember that the FEL at JLab where I worked fit in its own (reasonably sized) building, although the SRF accelerator that powered it only provided a 200MeV beam. Even then, they were able to do some seriously impressive things with it.
Holy crap. My research is relevant to something for once!
We're working on improving the accelerating gradients of linacs. Although I'm not sure that we'll ever get to the point where this technology is practical for use in CT scanners, we've had tremendous improvements over the past few years. Utilizing superconducting accelerating cavities, we've improved acceleration gradients from 5-7MV/m (megavolts per meter) to 35-70MV/m, with further improvements hypothetically possible.
The ILC (International Linear Collider -- the LHC's linear collider cousin) could be up to 50 miles long according to some estimates. CERN believe that they can build a 150MV/m machine, using a novel technique to achieve acceleration (although this has yet to be seen).
SLAC, where this facility is located, was built in 1962, and utilizes copper accelerating cavities, as opposed to the superconducting niobium cavities used in most new big linacs. Further, only the last 1/3 of the accelerator is used for the LCLS (ie. the X-Ray Laser). I haven't done the calculations (nor am I particularly familiar with the LCLS), though I'd imagine that you'd be able to considerably cut down on the size if LCLS were constructed with a new linac.
Uhm. I've been through a fair number of natural disasters.
Never seen a HAM trudging through the snow to inform us that the power was going to be out for the next few days at a minimum.
Never saw a HAM paddling down a flooded street.
Similarly, depending upon a loose-knit team of amateurs for emergency communications is dangerously unreliable. What if all the HAMs in my small town happen to be away on vacation when a disaster strikes?
Leave emergency communications to local law enforcement, kthanksbye, and stop trying to justify your love for anachronistic technologies.
Although it is true that, as you'd expect, the top 100 is dominated by major-label artists, there's a good portion of indie stuff out there.
Sub-Pop has had Nirvana, The Shins, The Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, and a number of artists you'd readily recognize.
This past year, bands such as Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes have garnered a lot of attention. Last year we had Feist, MGMT, and Vampire Weekend.
Right now, the top 25 Album chart on Amazon's MP3 store contains CDs by independent artists like Death Cab, The Decemberists, The Yeah Yeahs, Fleet Foxes.
Indie breakthroughs are actually becoming fairly common. The weird bit, though, is that TPB's tastes are overwhelmingly biased toward mainstream, big-label releases. (Maybe people feel more guilty about pirating from small artists?)
I'm not sure if the bittorrent sort of filesharing has helped terribly much. However, services like MySpace, PureVolume, and the independent blogging community as a whole certainly have given worthy small-time artists a whole lot more exposure.
> Don't worry, they are still going to implement the carbon tax.
Of course. Because it has never been about global warming or CO2. Otherwise CO2 emitted by India and China would have been as bad as emissions in the 1st world. But Kyoto exempted them. It is about a once in a lifetime opportunity for the 'enlightened good progressives' to get almost total control over all aspects of life in the West and thus finally stamp out everything they don't like by taxing it out of practicality. And the things they don't like include pretty much all of western civilization.
So what you're saying is that our elected representatives oppose policies that they don't like? Sounds like the system is running exactly like it's intended to. If you don't like it, I strongly suggest voting for the other guy (and finding some more compelling reasons to do so)
The climate in Antarctica is shifting all over the place.
It's probably a good idea to keep an eye on these things, and try to figure out what's causing it, and determine if it has any ramifications for the rest of us "up north"
Given that temperatures, weather patterns, and sea levels are extremely important to human activity, we need to get a bearing on what's going on, given that we're observing phenomena that have never been recorded.
If the climate really is changing, we need to know as far in advance as possible so that we can start planning for it, even if we're not causing it.
I've been in research groups who have (successfully) justified funding for research that they knew was a likely dead-end. I don't believe for an instant that climate science is one of those areas.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously.
I received better medical care under in the UK as a foreign student than I ever did in America, despite having an impressively comprehensive health insurance plan.
Evidence-based medicine FTW.
And then, take a page out of Knuth's book -- throw the code away, and write it again.
Can Knuth do us all a favor, and apply this philosophy to TeX?
Considering that the guy is praised as the 'God' of CS, LaTeX is one of the most archaic pieces of software that I've ever had to use.
You know when he takes his glasses off, and looks to the side? He's reading cue cards. Watch for it.
It's obvious once you're aware of it.
See for yourself (over and over).
I love the internet.
IIRC, isn't ray-tracing something that CPUs do better than GPUs?
If we actually do make the transition to ray-tracing, won't the logical solution be to simply have a CPU with more cores?
There are a few interesting developments at hand (GPGPUs, CPUs with on-die GPUs, etc....). We might have to wait a bit to see how these things play out.
Maybe it's not as simple as "winning" or "losing"?
The primary objective seems to have been to get Saddam and his government out. We 'won' that part.
Unfortunately, nobody planned for what came after that. You could argye that we've been "losing" ever since, and might never "win" without resorting to genocide. (Similarly, admitting a loss isn't exactly the same thing as losing)
Look at the Israel/Palestine conflict. Nobody is ever going to walk away from that as the clearly-defined "winner"
The Palm Pre needs to come out first for that particular plan to work.
Palm needs to break their exclusivity agreement with Sprint for that particular plan to work.
The flu's a virus. We've only had the facilities to treat the actual virus itself for a very short time (and even then, they're somewhat rarely used).
However, we've had the tools to treat the symptoms for quite some time. I don't doubt that they were considerably more primitive in 1918, although even the most basic treatments could mean the difference between life and death.
Could that be because the navy was there to provide medical facilities and treatment to the people on American Samoa?
Strictly speaking, the concentration of people on the ground is going to be much, much lower, and you always have the opportunity to run like hell (as opposed to being trapped on an upper floor, where you have literally no options)
If I got word that a hijacked airliner was heading for NYC, I'd want to get as far away from any tall buildings as humanly possible.
My question is, why the hell were they flying so low? They HAD to have known this would cause a scare!
I remember last summer feeling a huge rattling in my office building in Newport News, VA, to look out the window to see a 747 with a US flag painted across its tail pass by just a few hundred feet above. (This was also notable, because I'm pretty certain that the building is in restricted airspace)
This repeated two or three times more. Apparently it's normal for Air Force 1 to fly at ridiculously low altitudes (below radar?)
AFAIK, the only 747s operated by the US Government with that paint scheme are operated as Air Force 1.
You'll have to forgive my mild sarcasm, but isn't the singularity something that only exists in the context of New York Times editorials?
If we want to consider Google as part of the so-called singularity, bits such as this insight are worrying:
One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. "That's troubling to me," Ms. Mayer says. "Good students are good at all things."
Where's the space for normal folks? I pride myself upon having a broad range of interests, but quake in terror at the idea that a candidate who received a C in a subject distantly related to his field isn't even considered.
There's a crying need for physicists, chemists, and biologists.
I'll bite. I'm graduating in two weeks with a BSc in Physics.
The job market doesn't seem to indicate any such need...at least not for anything below the Ph.D level and outside the halls of academia.
So much for having a "flexible" degree. Employers currently seem to be looking for specialized degrees and/or several years of experience.
(It would seriously make my day to be proven wrong here...please feel free to jump in and provide evidence to the contrary)
Although it's become trendy to blame the Gaussian Copula function for the collapse of the bond market, I wouldn't be so quick to judge.
The function appears to have allowed investors to "re-package" risky debts to appear less risky by the system that was used to rate the bonds, which (very predictably) blew up in everybody's face when it came time to pay off the loans.
However, the "white-hat/black-hat" argument comes to mind. Although the exploit was bad, it seems as though somebody should have stepped in and fixed the bond rating system so that it could no longer be abused and manipulated.
Because 4.7GiB of bandwidth can be more expensive than the approx. $1 in two-way shipping that it costs to place the disc in the mail, and not everybody has a network connection able to stream those quantities of data.
Bandwidth might not be as expensive as Time Warner and co. are making it out to be, though it certainly isn't free.
Hell. 42 cents (or whatever it is now) is still a good deal for sending a letter across Manhattan, let alone the country.
Having lived in Alaska, I can also attest to the fact that their economy could very well collapse if the USPS withdrew from the area. 42 cents for a letter is damn cheap, considering how exorbitantly expensive it is to ship anything larger.
Also remember that packages typically have to cross international borders twice to get there. Shipping via cargo ship is in murkier waters, but nevertheless requires you to switch modes of transportation twice as well.
There is no railroad link between Alaska and the US/Canadian railroad network. The roads into Alaska don't follow the most direct/efficient route, and also tend to be avoided as a result. Virtually all freight arrives by air, sea, or rail barge. The capital, Juneau, isn't even connected to the road network.
Have you actually followed the development of Mac OS X since 10.0?
I have, and it is indeed true that the "eye candy" has improved with each release. However, each release has also loaded progressively more UI feature to the GPU from the CPU, which has generally resulted in a faster user experience, even on old hardware (I still regularly use a 450MHz G4 from 10 years ago -- it's surprisingly usable).
Some of the more flashy bits of eye candy gracefully degrade, and automatically disable themselves if your graphics card is too slow to adequately display the effect.
There are plenty of things that I can criticize apple for. Leopard is arguably the least stable *nix system I've touched, and made a few UI changes that felt like a step backward. However, it's disingenuous to criticize apple for improving eye candy without mentioning the (negligible) effect on performance that it had.
In fact, research has indicated that aesthetics have a huge effect on usability, even if the interfaces are otherwise identical.
Intersting -- I haven't completely read up on this, but I presume that operating in the non-superconducting region limits your pulse length of the FEL to something rather short compared to what could be achieved with a superconducting accelerator?
I remember that the FEL at JLab where I worked fit in its own (reasonably sized) building, although the SRF accelerator that powered it only provided a 200MeV beam. Even then, they were able to do some seriously impressive things with it.
Holy crap. My research is relevant to something for once!
We're working on improving the accelerating gradients of linacs. Although I'm not sure that we'll ever get to the point where this technology is practical for use in CT scanners, we've had tremendous improvements over the past few years. Utilizing superconducting accelerating cavities, we've improved acceleration gradients from 5-7MV/m (megavolts per meter) to 35-70MV/m, with further improvements hypothetically possible.
The ILC (International Linear Collider -- the LHC's linear collider cousin) could be up to 50 miles long according to some estimates. CERN believe that they can build a 150MV/m machine, using a novel technique to achieve acceleration (although this has yet to be seen).
SLAC, where this facility is located, was built in 1962, and utilizes copper accelerating cavities, as opposed to the superconducting niobium cavities used in most new big linacs. Further, only the last 1/3 of the accelerator is used for the LCLS (ie. the X-Ray Laser). I haven't done the calculations (nor am I particularly familiar with the LCLS), though I'd imagine that you'd be able to considerably cut down on the size if LCLS were constructed with a new linac.
Looks like somebody left those computers in the car for more than a fortnight.
IMO, the Mac flash client (particularly on PPC machines) is much worse than the Linux one, to the degree of being unusable on some sites.
Uhm. I've been through a fair number of natural disasters.
Never seen a HAM trudging through the snow to inform us that the power was going to be out for the next few days at a minimum.
Never saw a HAM paddling down a flooded street.
Similarly, depending upon a loose-knit team of amateurs for emergency communications is dangerously unreliable. What if all the HAMs in my small town happen to be away on vacation when a disaster strikes?
Leave emergency communications to local law enforcement, kthanksbye, and stop trying to justify your love for anachronistic technologies.
Really?
Although it is true that, as you'd expect, the top 100 is dominated by major-label artists, there's a good portion of indie stuff out there.
Sub-Pop has had Nirvana, The Shins, The Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, and a number of artists you'd readily recognize.
This past year, bands such as Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes have garnered a lot of attention. Last year we had Feist, MGMT, and Vampire Weekend.
Right now, the top 25 Album chart on Amazon's MP3 store contains CDs by independent artists like Death Cab, The Decemberists, The Yeah Yeahs, Fleet Foxes.
Indie breakthroughs are actually becoming fairly common. The weird bit, though, is that TPB's tastes are overwhelmingly biased toward mainstream, big-label releases. (Maybe people feel more guilty about pirating from small artists?)
I'm not sure if the bittorrent sort of filesharing has helped terribly much. However, services like MySpace, PureVolume, and the independent blogging community as a whole certainly have given worthy small-time artists a whole lot more exposure.
The data collected would be more analogous to MIT tracking who parks on campus.
> Don't worry, they are still going to implement the carbon tax.
Of course. Because it has never been about global warming or CO2. Otherwise CO2 emitted by India and China would have been as bad as emissions in the 1st world. But Kyoto exempted them. It is about a once in a lifetime opportunity for the 'enlightened good progressives' to get almost total control over all aspects of life in the West and thus finally stamp out everything they don't like by taxing it out of practicality. And the things they don't like include pretty much all of western civilization.
So what you're saying is that our elected representatives oppose policies that they don't like? Sounds like the system is running exactly like it's intended to. If you don't like it, I strongly suggest voting for the other guy (and finding some more compelling reasons to do so)
The climate in Antarctica is shifting all over the place.
It's probably a good idea to keep an eye on these things, and try to figure out what's causing it, and determine if it has any ramifications for the rest of us "up north"
Given that temperatures, weather patterns, and sea levels are extremely important to human activity, we need to get a bearing on what's going on, given that we're observing phenomena that have never been recorded.
If the climate really is changing, we need to know as far in advance as possible so that we can start planning for it, even if we're not causing it.
I've been in research groups who have (successfully) justified funding for research that they knew was a likely dead-end. I don't believe for an instant that climate science is one of those areas.