Congratulations. I'm halfway down the comment page, and you're the first commenter who seems to have actually RTFA.
I can't wait to see how Fox is going to spin this one....
It's also funny to watch the states-rights conservatives twitch whenever California tries to pass some sort of innovative or unusual legislation (which they've historically tended to do quite a lot of).
Though they also have very generous financial aid, which is getting more generous every year, so only the wealthiest students are actually paying the full $45K. I had a yearly required family contribution of near $0, and I have more loans from my two-year master's program (at a public school) than from my 5 years of undergrad at MIT.
Many colleges say this, but very few actually mean it. From what I hear, MIT might actually be one of the few who do actually have the financial resources to come through on it.
Why can't we get a straight answer about how much we have to pay? In my mind, this is an extremely clear-cut case where the middle-class gets completely screwed. On a personal level, I always assumed that I'd be qualified for some sort of aid, given that my parents clearly didn't have the resources to pay in full; in the end, I received no aid, and wound up shouldering the financial burden for my siblings as well after I graduated.
I'm sick of hearing MIT and the Ivies tote the line that they "turn away hundreds if not thousands of perfectly qualified applicants" while doing nothing to increase their capacity. This reeks of elitism, and needs to stop immediately if they're to be taken seriously as educational institutions.
If you send your kids to MIT, have them study marketing.
MIT's engineering program might be quite good -- I have no reason to doubt this. However, the amount of PR buzz that the school generates is disproportional to the amount of research that they produce, especially compared to similar institutions. Their marketing people must be very good.
As an aside, I should also grumble here about my ethical issues with an institution of learning that charges $45,000/year, and intentionally limits the number of students it takes on, despite having a pool of applicants that (by their own admission) are perfectly qualified to attend.
Although billing the state for travel seems sketchy, it's perfectly understandable why you wouldn't want to do business in Juneau -- it's in the bloody middle of nowhere. You can't even drive there, because it's not connected to the road system.
I really hate to be apologizing to Sarah Palin, but Alaska really does need to move its capitol to a more sensible location. Last I heard, money was the only thing holding the decision back -- there were also plans at one point to construct a new city halfway between Anchorage and Fairbanks that would serve as the capitol.
I should mention here that Anchorage is not the Capitol of Alaska. Given that she's still Governor, odds are that she's in Juneau, which is about 1,000 miles east of Anchorage.
That's like claiming you could see Florida from New York City.
Cars are bad for the US due to pollution and congestion -- there's no doubt about that.
However, they're a necessary evil for many of us, given that the US does not have the population density to support a nationwide public-transit system. Many of the areas that do have that sort of density were not built with public transport in mind.
India has 10 times the US's population density. The Indian National Railways is currently the world's largest employer, and operates one of the largest rail networks on the planet.
The GIMP doesn't do CMYK, which is rather useful if you ever want to print.
For anybody who does graphic design professionally, this shortcoming quite simply makes the GIMP completely inadequate, unless 100% of your work is going to be constrained to the digital realm.
Similarly, the cost of photoshop isn't that much, compared to what graphic designers are paid.
IMO, the Old Centurian vs. New Centurian fight scene was one of the best bits of the whole episode. If nothing else, I'd have liked if we saw more of those guys throughout the course of the show.
I also didn't find the universal acceptance of the "hey, let's discard every scrap of technology and be cavemen!" idea to be realistic or practical in the least.
Actually, that idea is not without philosophical precedent. Rousseau spoke extensively on the subject.
After an event that nearly wipes out the human population, you're left with two options -- rebuild the civilization, or revert back to the state of nature. If humanity suffered a nuclear holocaust, I'm not sure that we'd be clamoring to rebuild the same society that produced such a horrible event.
As it stands, the inhabitants of the Galactica universe did have some experience attempting to build a new civilization, and saw it quickly go corrupt at the hands of both man and cylon. After all, the conclusion of the show was all about "breaking the cycle"
This has a few (opposite) parallels over in the Mac world.
When the PPC platform stagnated, Mac OS releases started doing a strange thing.... they actually tended to be faster than the previous release on old hardware.
I've got a 450MHz G4 in its (mostly) original hardware configuration currently running 10.3.9. Unless I'm doing video encoding, or something else similarly processor-intensive, it certainly doesn't feel like a 10 year old machine. (The video encoding example is an interesting one, given that I used the machine 2 years ago for a large video-editing project with Final Cut Pro, and simply farmed out the rendering and encoding tasks to a more powerful machine -- FCP has remarkably modest hardware requirements)
This is all on a computer that shipped 2 years before the release of OS X. (As a random sidenote, I've also always been impressed that it could handle up to 2 GiB of RAM. That was unprecedented for its time)
Once Apple switched to Intel chips, new releases started to become progressively slower. Leopard would be an embarrassment if it weren't for the fact that Vista was even a bigger embarrassment.
IMO, the PowerPC's limitations actually drove a lot of innovation at Apple during those few years.
I'm kind of sick of the people who blame everything on Western Eurpopean culture. It is a fallacy. Japan was nearly wiped out after WWII, practically nuked into the stoneage. And yet they figured out how to crawl out of it in less than one generation. AND they have almost no natural resources.
Two cities were destroyed due to nuclear weapons in Japan during WWII. Although these were indeed strategically-important industrial cities, one could argue that the net damage to the nation was less than if there had been a conventional war.
Historians generally agree that the Pacific theatre would have turned into a protracted, bloody mess if the bomb hadn't been dropped.
Similarly, massive amounts of US loans and aid money were responsible for rebuilding Japan and Europe after the war. Japan didn't exactly "crawl out" on their own. This 'assistance' also had the effect of jump-starting the US economy after the war.
Drivers (as a stereotypical group) tend to learn from their experiences.
New Jersey drivers tend to be quite good at driving in congested traffic (and also keeping the flow moving in such a situation). Paradoxically, DC drivers have not developed this ability, and the Beltway remains far worse than any of the things the world makes fun of Jersey for.
NYC drivers know how to drive extremely aggressively in a grid, and somehow not kill anybody or hit anything in the process.
Alaska drivers are good at driving in the snow, and other slippery conditions, especially on unimproved roads. Put 'em on pavement in the summer, though, and they'll drive stupidly fast.
I'm sure I'm biased, given that I learned to drive in New Jersey. However, I still submit that it's an incredibly unfair assessment to call New Jerseyites poor drivers. They're no better, and certainly no worse than what you'll find elsewhere in the country. And the same holds true for every other driver stereotype, apart from Boston, which really does have the worst roads, with the worst drivers.
No, no, no! This is not a healthy line of thought! There is absolutely no way you can predict with certainty the future benefits of any scientific research. Even electricity was of uncertain value. The very point of public funding is for research whose benefits aren't obvious, but whose results are a benefit to science as a whole. You say that you believe it is possible to 'evaluate potential research'. How do you go about doing that? What are your criteria? Does research which has no practical application whatsoever but advances understanding of the whole get swept under the carpet?
One might argue that without establishments such as the Royal Society, a lot of great scientists in Great Britain might never have been able to publish.
You make a good argument. However, when you have a fixed amount of money, and need to distribute funding, these judgment calls do need to be made.
This debate rages on, particularly in the field of Fusion research. There are several proposed options on the table for attaining a self-sustaining reaction, only enough money to seriously fund one, and a rather fierce debate about which option is "best".
Is the LHC a good value for the money? Should we have constructed the ILC first instead? Should an international consortium have bailed out the SSC in the 90s?
I'm all for funding as much basic research as possible, although there comes a point when funding has to be cut off or redirected.
Back in the day, Microsoft had ports of NT for Alpha, PPC, and MIPS.
Alpha and MIPS are both dead and gone, while SPARC and PPC have corporate overlords who seem to have no interest in catering to the consumer market. (It also seems a bit unclear as to why Sun continue to develop and produce the SPARC, given the huge costs that must be associated with it)
I never really understood just how reactionary people can truly be until this past election cycle (and the subsequent aftermath)
The most sickening bit is that people seem perfectly content to sarcastically cheer on the failure of the president and the economy.
Say what you want about Obama's policies -- I personally don't agree with a number of them. However, you've got to cut the guy some slack -- he got thrown headfirst into one of the worst crises seen by the country in the greater part of a century.
I have a difficult time imagining that another politician would do much better (especially given that the Senate and House still have a fair bit to say in the matter). McCain simply didn't understand the economy, and Ron Paul would have silently rested on his pile of gold as he watched the world burn around him.
I don't think there was ever a promise of blank-check handouts or an easy ride. I don't think that anybody who was listening could have possibly interpreted it as that. Obama's speeches and statements on the economy -- even dating back to the election -- have been sobering, if not outright depressing. There's no magic bullet, and he knows it.
One promise that Obama has not faltered on is the accountability of himself and his staff, which is a surprising and dramatic departure from any politician in recent memory. This helps us learn from our mistakes, and grow as a result. This alone makes me trust him more than any of the other guys.
There are other, decidedly low-tech methods of solving this problem that are already in use.
Pumped Storage is a popular one that works by pumping water up to a reservoir at a high altitude during off-peak hours, and releasing it through a turbine during peak hours.
There are other options including flywheels, compressed gases, heat reservoirs, and of course, batteries. However, batteries tend to be prohibitively expensive.
We might have the materials science on the cutting edge in 100 years.
If we devoted proper resources to it we could do it in much less than that. With the focus of the coal industry on carbon sequestration, what better way to sequest some of the carbon?
That's pure speculation, and you know it. It might very well come to pass that the materials necessary to build a space elevator are simply impossible (or prohibitively impractical) to create.
I'd call/email Netflix. Their customer/technical support has been excellent every time I've used it, which is a shocking rarity these days (especially if you have to deal with Verizon and their ilk on a regular basis).
Netflix are one of those weird companies that still seem to give a damn about their customers. It's one of the things that keeps me a subscriber.
Even at that, you can ignore space or room-temperature superconductors.
Right now, there are a considerable number of devices that require superconductors at liquid nitrogen or liquid helium (~2 K) temperatures. You won't find them in your home, but you will find them everywhere at the cutting-edge of scientific research (medical imaging, particle accelerators, etc.)
The prospect of being able to make these devices cheaper, smaller, or more powerful is extremely enticing to the operators of these devices. Cooling something with liquid helium is insanely difficult and expensive.
If a device requires liquid Helium, you can be assured that its operators have extremely deep pockets, and are funding research to eliminate or reduce the need for liquid Helium cryogenics. To say the least, maintaining a device at 2 Kelvin is rather costly.
If the LHC could run at room temperature, it'd cost a mere fraction of what it does.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations. I'm halfway down the comment page, and you're the first commenter who seems to have actually RTFA.
I can't wait to see how Fox is going to spin this one....
It's also funny to watch the states-rights conservatives twitch whenever California tries to pass some sort of innovative or unusual legislation (which they've historically tended to do quite a lot of).
Though they also have very generous financial aid, which is getting more generous every year, so only the wealthiest students are actually paying the full $45K. I had a yearly required family contribution of near $0, and I have more loans from my two-year master's program (at a public school) than from my 5 years of undergrad at MIT.
Many colleges say this, but very few actually mean it. From what I hear, MIT might actually be one of the few who do actually have the financial resources to come through on it.
Why can't we get a straight answer about how much we have to pay? In my mind, this is an extremely clear-cut case where the middle-class gets completely screwed. On a personal level, I always assumed that I'd be qualified for some sort of aid, given that my parents clearly didn't have the resources to pay in full; in the end, I received no aid, and wound up shouldering the financial burden for my siblings as well after I graduated.
I'm sick of hearing MIT and the Ivies tote the line that they "turn away hundreds if not thousands of perfectly qualified applicants" while doing nothing to increase their capacity. This reeks of elitism, and needs to stop immediately if they're to be taken seriously as educational institutions.
I've said this many times before:
If you send your kids to MIT, have them study marketing.
MIT's engineering program might be quite good -- I have no reason to doubt this. However, the amount of PR buzz that the school generates is disproportional to the amount of research that they produce, especially compared to similar institutions. Their marketing people must be very good.
As an aside, I should also grumble here about my ethical issues with an institution of learning that charges $45,000/year, and intentionally limits the number of students it takes on, despite having a pool of applicants that (by their own admission) are perfectly qualified to attend.
Although billing the state for travel seems sketchy, it's perfectly understandable why you wouldn't want to do business in Juneau -- it's in the bloody middle of nowhere. You can't even drive there, because it's not connected to the road system.
I really hate to be apologizing to Sarah Palin, but Alaska really does need to move its capitol to a more sensible location. Last I heard, money was the only thing holding the decision back -- there were also plans at one point to construct a new city halfway between Anchorage and Fairbanks that would serve as the capitol.
I should mention here that Anchorage is not the Capitol of Alaska. Given that she's still Governor, odds are that she's in Juneau, which is about 1,000 miles east of Anchorage.
That's like claiming you could see Florida from New York City.
Cars are bad for the US due to pollution and congestion -- there's no doubt about that.
However, they're a necessary evil for many of us, given that the US does not have the population density to support a nationwide public-transit system. Many of the areas that do have that sort of density were not built with public transport in mind.
India has 10 times the US's population density. The Indian National Railways is currently the world's largest employer, and operates one of the largest rail networks on the planet.
The GIMP doesn't do CMYK, which is rather useful if you ever want to print.
For anybody who does graphic design professionally, this shortcoming quite simply makes the GIMP completely inadequate, unless 100% of your work is going to be constrained to the digital realm.
Similarly, the cost of photoshop isn't that much, compared to what graphic designers are paid.
The kick-ass Centurians-vs.-Stormtrooper's fight.
IMO, the Old Centurian vs. New Centurian fight scene was one of the best bits of the whole episode. If nothing else, I'd have liked if we saw more of those guys throughout the course of the show.
I also didn't find the universal acceptance of the "hey, let's discard every scrap of technology and be cavemen!" idea to be realistic or practical in the least.
Actually, that idea is not without philosophical precedent. Rousseau spoke extensively on the subject.
After an event that nearly wipes out the human population, you're left with two options -- rebuild the civilization, or revert back to the state of nature. If humanity suffered a nuclear holocaust, I'm not sure that we'd be clamoring to rebuild the same society that produced such a horrible event.
As it stands, the inhabitants of the Galactica universe did have some experience attempting to build a new civilization, and saw it quickly go corrupt at the hands of both man and cylon. After all, the conclusion of the show was all about "breaking the cycle"
This has a few (opposite) parallels over in the Mac world.
When the PPC platform stagnated, Mac OS releases started doing a strange thing.... they actually tended to be faster than the previous release on old hardware.
I've got a 450MHz G4 in its (mostly) original hardware configuration currently running 10.3.9. Unless I'm doing video encoding, or something else similarly processor-intensive, it certainly doesn't feel like a 10 year old machine. (The video encoding example is an interesting one, given that I used the machine 2 years ago for a large video-editing project with Final Cut Pro, and simply farmed out the rendering and encoding tasks to a more powerful machine -- FCP has remarkably modest hardware requirements)
This is all on a computer that shipped 2 years before the release of OS X. (As a random sidenote, I've also always been impressed that it could handle up to 2 GiB of RAM. That was unprecedented for its time)
Once Apple switched to Intel chips, new releases started to become progressively slower. Leopard would be an embarrassment if it weren't for the fact that Vista was even a bigger embarrassment.
IMO, the PowerPC's limitations actually drove a lot of innovation at Apple during those few years.
I'm kind of sick of the people who blame everything on Western Eurpopean culture. It is a fallacy. Japan was nearly wiped out after WWII, practically nuked into the stoneage. And yet they figured out how to crawl out of it in less than one generation. AND they have almost no natural resources.
Two cities were destroyed due to nuclear weapons in Japan during WWII. Although these were indeed strategically-important industrial cities, one could argue that the net damage to the nation was less than if there had been a conventional war.
Historians generally agree that the Pacific theatre would have turned into a protracted, bloody mess if the bomb hadn't been dropped.
Similarly, massive amounts of US loans and aid money were responsible for rebuilding Japan and Europe after the war. Japan didn't exactly "crawl out" on their own. This 'assistance' also had the effect of jump-starting the US economy after the war.
Drivers (as a stereotypical group) tend to learn from their experiences.
New Jersey drivers tend to be quite good at driving in congested traffic (and also keeping the flow moving in such a situation). Paradoxically, DC drivers have not developed this ability, and the Beltway remains far worse than any of the things the world makes fun of Jersey for.
NYC drivers know how to drive extremely aggressively in a grid, and somehow not kill anybody or hit anything in the process.
Alaska drivers are good at driving in the snow, and other slippery conditions, especially on unimproved roads. Put 'em on pavement in the summer, though, and they'll drive stupidly fast.
I'm sure I'm biased, given that I learned to drive in New Jersey. However, I still submit that it's an incredibly unfair assessment to call New Jerseyites poor drivers. They're no better, and certainly no worse than what you'll find elsewhere in the country. And the same holds true for every other driver stereotype, apart from Boston, which really does have the worst roads, with the worst drivers.
Yeech. It looked more like an infomercial to me.
I thought Dell was trying to distance themselves from stuff like this....
Last I checked, and admittedly It's been almost 12 hours, the sun isn't visible in the sky at night...
If you live above the Arctic circle, that isn't always necessarily true (and let me tell you, it does a number on your sleep patterns).
No, no, no! This is not a healthy line of thought! There is absolutely no way you can predict with certainty the future benefits of any scientific research. Even electricity was of uncertain value. The very point of public funding is for research whose benefits aren't obvious, but whose results are a benefit to science as a whole. You say that you believe it is possible to 'evaluate potential research'. How do you go about doing that? What are your criteria? Does research which has no practical application whatsoever but advances understanding of the whole get swept under the carpet?
One might argue that without establishments such as the Royal Society, a lot of great scientists in Great Britain might never have been able to publish.
You make a good argument. However, when you have a fixed amount of money, and need to distribute funding, these judgment calls do need to be made.
This debate rages on, particularly in the field of Fusion research. There are several proposed options on the table for attaining a self-sustaining reaction, only enough money to seriously fund one, and a rather fierce debate about which option is "best".
Is the LHC a good value for the money? Should we have constructed the ILC first instead? Should an international consortium have bailed out the SSC in the 90s?
I'm all for funding as much basic research as possible, although there comes a point when funding has to be cut off or redirected.
Should I mod this "up" or "down" ?
If we measure, won't that change the outcome?
We should let it simultaneously exist as funny and not exist as funny.
Oddly enough, that actually is how slashcode currently sees things. 'Funny' mods do zilch to your karma.
It can allow a Sempron to easily play high bitrate h.264 video (i.e. BluRay)
BluRay uses VC-1, not H.264.
Thought title said: "Costco Barges Into The Server Market". If so, I would've renewed my Costco card to get some cheap servers.
Yeah, but you've gotta buy a whole datacenter if you want one.
In the desktop/server market, yes. MIPS is dead and gone. Currently, they're an ARM-wannabe.
Back in the day, Microsoft had ports of NT for Alpha, PPC, and MIPS.
Alpha and MIPS are both dead and gone, while SPARC and PPC have corporate overlords who seem to have no interest in catering to the consumer market. (It also seems a bit unclear as to why Sun continue to develop and produce the SPARC, given the huge costs that must be associated with it)
I never really understood just how reactionary people can truly be until this past election cycle (and the subsequent aftermath)
The most sickening bit is that people seem perfectly content to sarcastically cheer on the failure of the president and the economy.
Say what you want about Obama's policies -- I personally don't agree with a number of them. However, you've got to cut the guy some slack -- he got thrown headfirst into one of the worst crises seen by the country in the greater part of a century.
I have a difficult time imagining that another politician would do much better (especially given that the Senate and House still have a fair bit to say in the matter). McCain simply didn't understand the economy, and Ron Paul would have silently rested on his pile of gold as he watched the world burn around him.
I don't think there was ever a promise of blank-check handouts or an easy ride. I don't think that anybody who was listening could have possibly interpreted it as that. Obama's speeches and statements on the economy -- even dating back to the election -- have been sobering, if not outright depressing. There's no magic bullet, and he knows it.
One promise that Obama has not faltered on is the accountability of himself and his staff, which is a surprising and dramatic departure from any politician in recent memory. This helps us learn from our mistakes, and grow as a result. This alone makes me trust him more than any of the other guys.
There are other, decidedly low-tech methods of solving this problem that are already in use.
Pumped Storage is a popular one that works by pumping water up to a reservoir at a high altitude during off-peak hours, and releasing it through a turbine during peak hours.
There are other options including flywheels, compressed gases, heat reservoirs, and of course, batteries. However, batteries tend to be prohibitively expensive.
If we devoted proper resources to it we could do it in much less than that. With the focus of the coal industry on carbon sequestration, what better way to sequest some of the carbon?
That's pure speculation, and you know it. It might very well come to pass that the materials necessary to build a space elevator are simply impossible (or prohibitively impractical) to create.
I'd call/email Netflix. Their customer/technical support has been excellent every time I've used it, which is a shocking rarity these days (especially if you have to deal with Verizon and their ilk on a regular basis).
Netflix are one of those weird companies that still seem to give a damn about their customers. It's one of the things that keeps me a subscriber.
Even at that, you can ignore space or room-temperature superconductors.
Right now, there are a considerable number of devices that require superconductors at liquid nitrogen or liquid helium (~2 K) temperatures. You won't find them in your home, but you will find them everywhere at the cutting-edge of scientific research (medical imaging, particle accelerators, etc.)
The prospect of being able to make these devices cheaper, smaller, or more powerful is extremely enticing to the operators of these devices. Cooling something with liquid helium is insanely difficult and expensive.
If a device requires liquid Helium, you can be assured that its operators have extremely deep pockets, and are funding research to eliminate or reduce the need for liquid Helium cryogenics. To say the least, maintaining a device at 2 Kelvin is rather costly.
If the LHC could run at room temperature, it'd cost a mere fraction of what it does.