Actually, talking to your passenger is usually a fairly good thing. It keeps you alert and awake. The passenger is also usually smart enough to know to shut up when you're changing lanes or making a turn.
Honestly, although they haven't yet opened Flash (completely), Adobe have shown some very promising signs lately.
Encourage them, and give it time. I think that they've actually gotten to the point, where they're beginning to want to cooperate, given that the company seems to have lost its competitive edge over the past few years.
I doubt flash will go completely OSS, though I do imagine that they'll substantially reduce the restrictions on it. I do believe that a successor to Flash is in the works, however. AIR is a very neat proof of concept, and seems to effortlessly achieve what Java Web Start keeps promising to do.
If there is a Flash successor, in order to compete with SilverLight, and to avoid the terrible quality of recent Flash releases (100% CPU usage to play a YouTube video!?), the format and player will likely be completely open, with a complement of a for-pay development environment.
Will Adobe open Photoshop? Probably never. However, I do believe that an open version of Flash and Linux Photoshop will very likely happen in the next few years.
Lagrangian Mechanics gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of your coordinate system, and tends to be much better for solving systems with many interacting forces. It's essentially a mathematical re-formulation of Netwonian Mechanics.. The underlying laws are all the same, but the math used to arrive at a solution is quite different.
Of course, this is all for solving problems analytically. Computers most likely do things differently.
I imagine that the "physics" computations which take place in most games are heavily vectorized. Similarly, I'm sure that you could do some sort of interpolation/guesswork either in hardware, or API that reduces the number of "hard" calculations required.
GPUs are designed specifically to do vector math, and it only seemed logical that an API would come along that properly exposed these functions to other software.
I imagine that it's very similar to CUDA, but more optimized, and with an API that contains functions geared toward game devs. I'm no expert, but any "vectorized" code should be a prime candidate for this sort of architecture (MATLAB code specifically tends to be vectorized)
If you'll notice in recent weeks, that Democrats are indirectly being blamed for Iraq and 9/11, because they wouldn't let the oil companies drill under some wildlife refuge (despite the huge swaths of unexplored territory already available to them)
The fact is that liberals have control of the networks - I saw poll that showed essentially all journalists at CNN, ABC, CBS etc vote for the Democrats.
[Citation-Needed]
Seriously. You're proving the point many here are making about Fox News viewers. Because much of the reporting fails to provide context, or arrives at conclusions based on tenuous data, viewpoints frequently get contorted to the political viewpoints of the networks and broadcasters.
In particular, many news organizations explicitly prohibit this sort of behavior. NPR has an excellent writeup and analysis of these policies.
The poll you mention, is most likely http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19113485">the one conducted by MSNBC last year, which did indeed find that 9 out of 10 journalists who made donations did so to the democratic party.
The poll identified 143 such individuals who made political donations. The total sample size consisted of approximately 100,000 newsroom staffers.
In other words, approximately 0.1% of journalists donated money to the democratic party.
Other forms of media - talk radio, for instance, have a blatant and well-known conservative bias. On the way to work yesterday, the guy I carpool with had it on, and the host was arguing against nationalized healthcare, for the reason that (and I quote) "poor people deserve to die." (He also went on a huge pro-Christian rant later on in the show. Has this guy ever even looked at the New Testament?)
Similarly, I could imagine that many non-pundit journalists are going to exhibit a somewhat liberal bias, given that they've been very closely exposed to the news of the past 7 years, particularly, the gruesome images coming from Iraq and Afghanistan that aren't allowed to be showed on TV. I can't imagine that many of the journalists in Iraq are particularly happy about being shot at.
To quote Stephen Colbert: "Reality has a well-known liberal bias"
You can argue the merits of small vs. big government, but most people who have kept up with the doings of the current administration are pretty appalled on both a logical and emotional level. We went to war, lowered taxes in order to do so, and then sanctioned actions that would have been considered war crimes under any other administration.
And this is sponsored by the Department of Energy for what reason?
For the same reason the Department of Commerce is responsible for our atomic clocks?
Actually, NIST takes care of all of that stuff.
Even the staunchest small-government conservative should be able to readily admit that a country as large as the US needs an organization like NIST to keep weights and measures standardized.
As far as I know, they do a pretty good job of it too.
(Oh, and lots of research falls under the DoE, because they have lots of money, due to the fact that their core mission is quite important, and because they're the most "famous" of the federally-funded science agencies, with a core mission that even non-scientists understand to be important)
If you lose your eyesight, the "vision centers" in your brain will begin to atrophy, and you'll lose the mental capacity to process images.
Best to "exercise" those areas as much as possible. Once those nerves die, they're gone for good. Figure out how to grow those back, and you'll nearly have achieved the holy grail of medicine.
Start with the most frequently used lights. If you want to cut down on excess waste and do things gradually, start when your lights begin to burn out!
Because color temperatures tend to vary slightly, do this an entire room at a time. When one bulb burns out, toss the dead bulb, and replace all of the others in the room with energy-efficient CFLs. Save the other "partially-used", and use them to replace dead bulbs elsewhere around the house.
Repeat this process each time you run out of spares, and within a few years, you should be running entirely on energy-efficient bulbs.
I'm not sure how much energy actually goes into the manufacture of an incandescent lightbulb, but if you're looking to do things gradually, there's no use in unnecessarily wasting lightbulbs!
If we can devise a method to manufacture them cheaply, they'll become very widely used.
Think about it.... a material that is stronger, lighter, and less voluminous than steel could replace it in any application where weight, space, or amount of material is an issue. Bridges, automobiles, and buildings come to mind very quickly.
The internet was more of an applied engineering project than a "science experiment."
It was essentially an application of already existing technologies, just in the same way that I wouldn't necessarily call the development of Linux or hardware (eg. the iPod) "science".
It sounds more like a logical result of capitalism in general.
If the same work can be done abroad for far less (assuming you also include the associated "hidden" costs), this is a good business decision, in which everyone profits.
The work gets done to a presumably acceptable standard, so the "client" profits. The student only has to pay a small fee compared to what he would be getting paid, and only has to invest a minimal amount of time in the effort, so therefore he profits. The worker in India receives work that he otherwise wouldn't have, and is paid a wage that is considered competitive in his own country; he profits. Through this sort of trade, India continues to build up their economy, and train an educated workforce; the state therefore also profits by these acts.
Is this necessarily a good thing for the UK and US? Possibly not. However, given the presence of cheap, talented labor, it's a very easily predictable outcome of a capitalist society.
If anything, these guys should be given Management degrees, as they have proven themselves to be very shrewd in that regard. The issue over whether or not they should be given IT degrees is somewhat debatable. Although they've demonstrated no competence in their own field, they have demonstrated the ability to complete the work anyway.
Well, if you need legacy support for a handful of infrequently-used Microsoft apps, virtualization is certainly a valid solution, and has been quickly adopted for virtually every platform used today.
If your apps are really old, DOSBox tends to do a better job of running old DOS apps than the compatibility layer in Microsoft's NT-based operating systems does. It's also got a good x86 emulation layer, and therefore runs on just about any platform you can throw at it.
I will agree, however, that Photoshop, Final Cut, and many other "creative" apps that simply don't have large enough userbases to justify a decent open-source version are still a thorn in Linux's side. I can't live without Lightroom or Photoshop, and like you said, the open source alternatives are genuinely pathetic.
However, given that Adobe seem to be going through a (much needed) transformation at the moment, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a Linux-native Photoshop in the future. Apple called Adobe out on the fact that their product depends on libraries that everyone else stopped using 8-10 years ago, and that seems to be motivating them to actually start developing innovative products again, this time using a more portable code-base.
That's fine. I actually support y'all in these cases.
However, the Hams seem like a sort of pesky special interest group that used to be a whole lot more relevant than they are now.
Why can't we work together to develop some new standards for a robust civilian radio network that uses less bandwidth and isn't as prone to interference?
Slashdot Mirror
According to Douglas Adams, in the future, computers will be making beverages for us that are "almost but not quite, entirely unlike tea"
It's a proof of concept. Give them some slack!
Think you can do better?
Who wants to bet how long it will be before Google buys up the guys who made that presentation app?
It could certainly be a bit faster, but it's still damn impressive.
Actually, talking to your passenger is usually a fairly good thing. It keeps you alert and awake. The passenger is also usually smart enough to know to shut up when you're changing lanes or making a turn.
And this is precisely why it isn't science. Creationism says "God did it" without any way to test it.
By that definition, what is string theory?
So far, we have no way to prove or disprove it, apart from a few somewhat ambiguous mathematical proofs.
I could never get it to work...
It's still got a ways to go.
Honestly, although they haven't yet opened Flash (completely), Adobe have shown some very promising signs lately.
Encourage them, and give it time. I think that they've actually gotten to the point, where they're beginning to want to cooperate, given that the company seems to have lost its competitive edge over the past few years.
I doubt flash will go completely OSS, though I do imagine that they'll substantially reduce the restrictions on it. I do believe that a successor to Flash is in the works, however. AIR is a very neat proof of concept, and seems to effortlessly achieve what Java Web Start keeps promising to do.
If there is a Flash successor, in order to compete with SilverLight, and to avoid the terrible quality of recent Flash releases (100% CPU usage to play a YouTube video!?), the format and player will likely be completely open, with a complement of a for-pay development environment.
Will Adobe open Photoshop? Probably never. However, I do believe that an open version of Flash and Linux Photoshop will very likely happen in the next few years.
You're probably right, although computerized analytical solutions certainly aren't out of the question, as proven by Mathematica and the like.
It could very well be faster to analytically solve the equations of motion every so often, and simply plug into those results as time evolves.
I doubt that this is the case, as the underlying programming would be extremely complicated, and I'm not quite sure that it would even work.
Nope. Not quite :-)
Lagrangian Mechanics gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of your coordinate system, and tends to be much better for solving systems with many interacting forces. It's essentially a mathematical re-formulation of Netwonian Mechanics.. The underlying laws are all the same, but the math used to arrive at a solution is quite different.
Of course, this is all for solving problems analytically. Computers most likely do things differently.
Actually, I'd think that the underlying algorithms would resemble Lagrangian Mechanics, rather than Newtonian Mechanics.
I imagine that the "physics" computations which take place in most games are heavily vectorized. Similarly, I'm sure that you could do some sort of interpolation/guesswork either in hardware, or API that reduces the number of "hard" calculations required.
GPUs are designed specifically to do vector math, and it only seemed logical that an API would come along that properly exposed these functions to other software.
I imagine that it's very similar to CUDA, but more optimized, and with an API that contains functions geared toward game devs. I'm no expert, but any "vectorized" code should be a prime candidate for this sort of architecture (MATLAB code specifically tends to be vectorized)
1) What bearing (if) anything does this have on Russia's controversial territorial claim of the region?
2) Is there oil? (Serious question)
The story is specifically talking about the ice over the geographic north pole.
It's certainly possible that this trend isn't taking place over the entire arctic.
Um. We've already gone to 6 in a sense.
If you'll notice in recent weeks, that Democrats are indirectly being blamed for Iraq and 9/11, because they wouldn't let the oil companies drill under some wildlife refuge (despite the huge swaths of unexplored territory already available to them)
The warming trend has been levelling off for the past few years.
Citation, please?
The fact is that liberals have control of the networks - I saw poll that showed essentially all journalists at CNN, ABC, CBS etc vote for the Democrats.
[Citation-Needed]
Seriously. You're proving the point many here are making about Fox News viewers. Because much of the reporting fails to provide context, or arrives at conclusions based on tenuous data, viewpoints frequently get contorted to the political viewpoints of the networks and broadcasters.
In particular, many news organizations explicitly prohibit this sort of behavior. NPR has an excellent writeup and analysis of these policies.
The poll you mention, is most likely http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19113485">the one conducted by MSNBC last year, which did indeed find that 9 out of 10 journalists who made donations did so to the democratic party.
The poll identified 143 such individuals who made political donations. The total sample size consisted of approximately 100,000 newsroom staffers.
In other words, approximately 0.1% of journalists donated money to the democratic party.
Other forms of media - talk radio, for instance, have a blatant and well-known conservative bias. On the way to work yesterday, the guy I carpool with had it on, and the host was arguing against nationalized healthcare, for the reason that (and I quote) "poor people deserve to die." (He also went on a huge pro-Christian rant later on in the show. Has this guy ever even looked at the New Testament?)
Similarly, I could imagine that many non-pundit journalists are going to exhibit a somewhat liberal bias, given that they've been very closely exposed to the news of the past 7 years, particularly, the gruesome images coming from Iraq and Afghanistan that aren't allowed to be showed on TV. I can't imagine that many of the journalists in Iraq are particularly happy about being shot at.
To quote Stephen Colbert: "Reality has a well-known liberal bias"
You can argue the merits of small vs. big government, but most people who have kept up with the doings of the current administration are pretty appalled on both a logical and emotional level. We went to war, lowered taxes in order to do so, and then sanctioned actions that would have been considered war crimes under any other administration.
For the same reason the Department of Commerce is responsible for our atomic clocks?
Actually, NIST takes care of all of that stuff.
Even the staunchest small-government conservative should be able to readily admit that a country as large as the US needs an organization like NIST to keep weights and measures standardized.
As far as I know, they do a pretty good job of it too.
(Oh, and lots of research falls under the DoE, because they have lots of money, due to the fact that their core mission is quite important, and because they're the most "famous" of the federally-funded science agencies, with a core mission that even non-scientists understand to be important)
If you lose your eyesight, the "vision centers" in your brain will begin to atrophy, and you'll lose the mental capacity to process images.
Best to "exercise" those areas as much as possible. Once those nerves die, they're gone for good. Figure out how to grow those back, and you'll nearly have achieved the holy grail of medicine.
Because color temperatures tend to vary slightly, do this an entire room at a time. When one bulb burns out, toss the dead bulb, and replace all of the others in the room with energy-efficient CFLs. Save the other "partially-used", and use them to replace dead bulbs elsewhere around the house.
Repeat this process each time you run out of spares, and within a few years, you should be running entirely on energy-efficient bulbs.
I'm not sure how much energy actually goes into the manufacture of an incandescent lightbulb, but if you're looking to do things gradually, there's no use in unnecessarily wasting lightbulbs!
If we can devise a method to manufacture them cheaply, they'll become very widely used.
Think about it.... a material that is stronger, lighter, and less voluminous than steel could replace it in any application where weight, space, or amount of material is an issue. Bridges, automobiles, and buildings come to mind very quickly.
The internet was more of an applied engineering project than a "science experiment."
It was essentially an application of already existing technologies, just in the same way that I wouldn't necessarily call the development of Linux or hardware (eg. the iPod) "science".
It sounds more like a logical result of capitalism in general.
If the same work can be done abroad for far less (assuming you also include the associated "hidden" costs), this is a good business decision, in which everyone profits.
The work gets done to a presumably acceptable standard, so the "client" profits.
The student only has to pay a small fee compared to what he would be getting paid, and only has to invest a minimal amount of time in the effort, so therefore he profits.
The worker in India receives work that he otherwise wouldn't have, and is paid a wage that is considered competitive in his own country; he profits.
Through this sort of trade, India continues to build up their economy, and train an educated workforce; the state therefore also profits by these acts.
Is this necessarily a good thing for the UK and US? Possibly not. However, given the presence of cheap, talented labor, it's a very easily predictable outcome of a capitalist society.
If anything, these guys should be given Management degrees, as they have proven themselves to be very shrewd in that regard. The issue over whether or not they should be given IT degrees is somewhat debatable. Although they've demonstrated no competence in their own field, they have demonstrated the ability to complete the work anyway.
Well, if you need legacy support for a handful of infrequently-used Microsoft apps, virtualization is certainly a valid solution, and has been quickly adopted for virtually every platform used today.
If your apps are really old, DOSBox tends to do a better job of running old DOS apps than the compatibility layer in Microsoft's NT-based operating systems does. It's also got a good x86 emulation layer, and therefore runs on just about any platform you can throw at it.
I will agree, however, that Photoshop, Final Cut, and many other "creative" apps that simply don't have large enough userbases to justify a decent open-source version are still a thorn in Linux's side. I can't live without Lightroom or Photoshop, and like you said, the open source alternatives are genuinely pathetic.
However, given that Adobe seem to be going through a (much needed) transformation at the moment, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a Linux-native Photoshop in the future. Apple called Adobe out on the fact that their product depends on libraries that everyone else stopped using 8-10 years ago, and that seems to be motivating them to actually start developing innovative products again, this time using a more portable code-base.
That's fine. I actually support y'all in these cases.
However, the Hams seem like a sort of pesky special interest group that used to be a whole lot more relevant than they are now.
Why can't we work together to develop some new standards for a robust civilian radio network that uses less bandwidth and isn't as prone to interference?