In fairness, if you RTFA you'd know that they specifically discourage the use of their system to evaluate paintings and hand-drawn artwork; the system is instead meant to evaluate color photographs.
I can think of one. H. Beam Piper committed suicide in 1964. In an introduction to one of his books (which had been given to me by a fellow science fiction enthusiast in my youth), obviously written posthumously by a friend (Pournelle maybe?), the circumstances were laid out in saddening detail. The poor bastard had been reduced to shooting pigeons out of his window for food. He probably killed himself in despair over his career, although the Wikipedia article mentions that his beliefs were in fact partly erroneous, as Piper was unaware of some book sales.
The Wikipedia article also does mention that Piper was hugely influential, mostly of other science fiction writers. I'd argue that Piper was a "genre giant" who died in poverty.
I'm sure other enterprising souls out there can think of more examples.
It seems, though, that the article you reference has backpedaled on that claim:
Update #2: Intel has just confirmed that the Core 2 Quad Q8400 does support Intel's VT-x from the start, so the update below is incorrect. The Q8300, E5400, E5300, E7500 and E7400 will also end up transitioning to versions with VT-x support as well but only the Q8400 supports it from launch.
So it would seem that this oft-repeated wisdom of the masses is in fact wrong, and the Core 2 Quad Q8400 has VT support after all.
Oh, right, you're just going to pull a No True Scotsman and claim anyone who makes his game work better on the 360 than the PS3 is not a real console developer.
In fairness, though, it's true that PC ports are a heckuva lot easier on the Xbox 360, because of the exceedingly similar development model, compared to the PS3, which is far more... idiosyncratic.
It's also possible that some developers were paid more to make the Xbox 360 version or port of a game superior. Or that they were paid to effectively castrate the PS3 version. (I'm looking at you, Bethesda... Not a day goes by that I don't hear one of my friends complaining about how the PS3 version of Fallout 3 is now abandonware and won't be getting the latest patches/bugfixes, never mind the exclusive content that Microsoft paid them to make for the Xbox 360.)
but I thought everyone knew the 360 has a better graphics chip
Who is "everyone"? What makes the Xbox 360's graphics chip "better"? What definition of "better" are we using?
and more general purpose processing power (PS3 has some advantages with certain tasks using the SPUs)
It's the old engineering tradeoff -- more general purpose cores or more special purpose processors that can offload certain tasks? In point of fact, while the Xbox 360 has 3 PowerPC cores which are equivalent to the single core of the Cell chip in the PS3, there are certain tasks performed by the SPEs on the Cell which all of the general-purpose cores of the Xbox chip put together couldn't execute in a reasonable amount of time. Media decoding and decompression tasks are a dream on the SPEs. (That the PS3 can fully decode both Blu-Ray and multi-channel SACD media with no effort is pretty amazing.) It's also worth noting that, while the SPEs are kind of like DSP cores, they're not nearly as specialized as some of the custom chips in previous generations of game consoles and computers.
and the game performance proves it - everyone tells me the 360 versions run more smoothly and are prettier than the PS3 versions
Which is it? Does the game performance prove it, or are you relying on anecdotal evidence? Or do you mean that you believe the game performance of the Xbox 360 is better because your friends tell you? Again, who is "everyone"?
It does appear that some developers with existing code bases had an easier time porting to the Xbox 360 than to the PS3 -- I'm thinking of Orange Box specifically. Shouldn't be any surprise, since the Xbox 360 adheres more closely to a traditional development model that PC game developers have been using for years.
In short, if you care about your game console not going belly-up on you after a few months, you're probably better off with a PS3. If you want something that can be more than just a game console, you want a PS3. You can argue graphical quality all day long, though honestly the vast majority of PS3 titles look better to me than their Xbox 360 equivalents, with few exceptions. In the end, some of us care more about being able to play a game to completion without our consoles dying on us than in some retarded chest-thumping session or belonging to the biggest tribe of gamers who need external validation.
Hmm, maybe reliability is what some people mean when they say the PS3 has better hardware?
Dude, you keep pimping your crazy vector processing "idea" and that particular blog entry non-stop. I know I've been accused of this in the past, so this may come off as hypocritical, but cripes, learn how to not be a one-issue commenter who hijacks any story or thread to try and promote your own brand of crazy. (And just FYI, I read your "How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis" article... blog rant... whatever you want to call it. You don't articulate your ideas very well, and you don't provide a rigorous mathematical foundation for your arguments.)
Oh, and the "last century multithreaded programming model" is no less deterministic than the kind of vector processing you're promoting... unless you really abuse the definition of "deterministic" to mean only what you want it to mean. It's just that two or more threads won't run in lock-step with each other, so locking and synchronization techniques must be employed in cases where ordering is important. When you consider that some workloads naturally take longer to complete than others, or that parallel workloads may require intermediate results from each other, it's easy to see how a vector processing system that enforced the programming model you endorse would easily lead to inefficiencies of hardware utilization. Easier to program, but more profligate with use of energy, among other things.
But you don't have to believe me. If Objective-C was so great, it'd be used outside the Apple platform. It's not.
And this is a fallacy that gets repeated a lot. Just because something is popular (computer language, video tape format, currency, etc.) doesn't mean it's good, or that it's good for you. Things become popular through a combination of factors, and dumb luck seems to be pretty high on the list. There are many cases where the "best" solution loses out to the cheaper solution that's "good enough."
Another thing to consider is what you mean by "good" (or "great" to use your wording). If you're doing government contract work and you're asked to write software, you may be forced to use ADA (or some other DOD approved language) because nothing else meets the stringent requirements of your employer. In short, nothing else is "good enough."
Arguing from popularity is a common logical fallacy. As it stands, it seems clear that the popularity of Objective C (or the lack of popularity) is due to a lack of traction with popular operating systems (i.e., Windows), and the only reason developers are even looking at Objective C now is that Apple has effectively forced iPhone developers to use Objective C -- in other words, the iPhone's popularity has forced developers to take a look (or a second look). Since there's nothing stopping developers from incorporating C and C++ code and libraries into their Objective C applications, I don't see what the big deal is?
The article only briefly touches on the 1802, which was a ground-breaking chip that found its way into satellites and control systems for just about every kind of military gear you could think of.
I built a Cosmac Elf as a science fair project in high school, and it was a blast. The heart was an 1802 processor -- I didn't get the rad-hardened version in the ceramic package, which would have cost far more than my shoestring budget could afford, but the plastic package version instead. The design was already old when I started wire wrapping this thing, so some parts had to be replaced with improvised versions (e.g., the hexadecimal display chips that had dot-matrix LEDs on the top face, and took a nybble as input -- had to replace those with 8 discrete LEDs and read output in straight binary).
One of the things I liked about the 1802 is that it had TTL outputs with enough juice to drive certain control circuits without a bunch of extra coupling hardware. (Some low power devices could be driven directly, and everything else just needed a cheap transistor. I drove relays with this thing.) There were also inputs to which you could directly attach some analog domain sensors, such as a photoresistor.
Sorry to see the 1802 didn't make the list, but at least they included the 555 and the 741.
Surprised they didn't mention that the 68000 was one of the few CPUs to use a nanocode architecture to decode microcode operations, in order to reduce the chip real-estate used for storing decode logic -- in my grad level CPU architecture class, the technique was likened to using two smaller ROMs and a bit of clever logic to replace one huge ROM. (And when I took 6.004 as an undergrad, we actually built a discrete component computer using this exact same technique -- one EPROM was for the nanocode interpreter, and two served the microcode interpreter. Oddly enough, we were told by our professor, "This technique would never be used in the real world." Maybe not in 1993, but the 68000 has an older pedigree, and was apparently one of the last few chips to be designed by hand. If I were those guys, I too would be using every trick and cheat to reduce transistor count.)
Same here on a Vista 64 system last night. IE8 showed up as an "Important" update for me, not critical -- only XP users will see it as a critical update. I chose a custom install, and was indeed prompted every step of the way; I just had to click on the appropriate radio buttons, or an occasional checkbox, to get what I wanted. Once complete, none of my settings were altered.
One annoying thing I noticed about PrivBar is that both the x86 and x64 versions seem to behave differently after the upgrade to IE8. Checked Aaron Margosis' blog, and one of the latest comments on this blog entry describes the problem, and the author of PrivBar actually responded to the comment with news that he's working on a new version that works around the IE8 "bug":
It's a bug in IE8 -- it doesn't show the title of toolbars, which is where PrivBar puts the username. I'm testing an updated version that puts all the info in the button.
One of the most useful things about PrivBar, besides providing a visual indicator of which version of IE you're using (32 or 64 bit) and what your privilege level is, is that it displayed the user ID the process is running under. That's really important from a security standpoint.
But the Federation had a war with the Romulans in an earlier era, using more primitive weapons (some type of nuclear device). Just because nobody in the Federation had ever seen a Romulan face-to-face (or face-to-viewscreen) doesn't mean that the Federation had no prior dealings with the Romulans. There is definite dialog from Kirk and Spock, as well as other ancillary characters, from that very episode which explains all this.
Besides, this movie is in a separate time line and a separate continuity, so you shouldn't expect the timeline of this film to correlate too closely with TOS.
First off, it's rogue. Rouge is makeup you apply to your cheeks (or anywhere else you want a "healthy blush").
Secondly, if you actually paid attention to the episodes in question (a story arc that lasted 2 or 3 episodes), you would know that the Klingons were going to destroy the research facility to stop the spread of this viral trait. A cure was discovered, and the Klingon powers that be relented. Klingons on a single colony were affected by this trait, and it was implied that the Klingon scientists were going to have their hands full reversing this genetic mangling. It did not spread to the entire Klingon empire.
Yeah, I know, way too much nit picking about a damn TV show. But I thought the story arc was cool, especially the idea that Noonian Soong's ancestor was actually originally interested in genetic engineering to enhance humans, not robotics or cybernetics.
Just to add my voice to the throng, I own this mouse and use it extensively with my MacBook Pro. For me, a USB dongle was simply not an option because there are times when I need those USB ports for something else, or when the port is physically blocked because I'm working under less-than-ideal conditions.
The Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 solved most of my problems. It's a great basic mouse. The only caveat is that it only has a single extra mouse button (besides the right and left and the clickable scroll wheel), but that suits my needs just fine. Under OS X, I have the 4th mouse button bound to show/hide the dashboard, which is great because I have a dashboard widget that lets me do photo uploads and requires that I drag icons from the desktop and drop them onto the dashboard widget. (That's not a maneuver I'd want to attempt with just the keyboard and the trackpad!)
Under World of Warcraft, that 4th mouse button will toggle autorun (and this works under both OS X and Vista). The mouse is great for gaming as well as "serious" work. Battery life is great. Waking up from sleep takes a few seconds, but I've only had that happen when I went AFK for a while.
My fiancee has an HP laptop running Vista, and she uses the same mouse. We can both be using our mice paired with our respective laptops in the same room and not have problems with interference, which is a good sign. She plays WoW a lot more than I do, so she has invested in rechargeable batteries for the mouse.
It might help your argument if you actually, you know, knew the substance of the Dawkins lecture in Oklahoma before commenting on it. But then you wouldn't have much to say, because Dawkins' lecture wasn't nearly as controversial as you'd like to think. Or hope. I'll go into that more in a moment, but first...
I don't remember a ban on Dawkins, I remember a censure statement criticizing the lack of equal time for competing theories and stating that Dawkins is too polarizing for public funded venues. Of course I see the freedom from religion in the same light as the freedom of religion which does question the state or any state resources speaking about it at all. Dawkins does speak about religion and he does call people names.
Again, you might want to actually read the text of the resolution so you could actually be well informed as to what the resolution said. It was a resolution, not a censure statement -- and no, that's not hair splitting, it's a difference with meaning. The resolution says nothing about time for "competing theories," in fact, although it calls for an "open, dignified, and fair discussion of the Darwinian [sic] theory of evolution and all other scientific theories" and then proceeds to tell OU how it ought to be conducting the business of science.
The resolution does explicitly state that the Oklahoma legislature opposed Dawkins' visit because of the statments he's made about evolution and the opinions he's expressed about those who do not agree with his viewpoint. That's awfully "noble" of them, until you start to question why the Oklahoma legislature hasn't condemned any fundamentalist Christian clergy for the patently offensive statements they've made about the theory of evolution and its adherents. The difference here seems to be that the Oklahoma legislature thinks that mob rule serves as justification for asymmetric treatment.
Then there's the little detail that after the lecture, the legislators who engineered the aforementioned resolution weren't satisfied, and decided to go on a witch hunt because the university had the audacity to not bow to political pressure. Doesn't this response seem just a bit lacking in proportion? Or is that "justified" because you think Dawkins is a dirty name-caller?
Anyways, not wanting a polarizing person speaking on the public funded dime isn't really an attack on science, It's an attack on a polarizing person. His message is secondary to say the least. Especially when the school already teaches evolutionary biology. SO obviously, it wasn't evolutionary biology that was the problem, it was his "deliverance" of it.
The sad thing is, people like you actually believe this crap that you spew, and think it makes a dandy justification. Fortunately, Dawkins and some of his apologists actually addressed this issue. But before I touch on that larger issue, I want to point out that despite your characterization of the man giving the lecture, the substance of the lecture was far less polarizing than you might imagine, and it was very well received by the audience with the exception of one man. You can read a summary of the lecture here and here (although I think PZ Meyers would have been better served by avoiding the kind of editorial comments he made in that second link, even though it's his blog and he can say whatever he damn well pleases). The one man who made a scene may or may not have been the only creationist in attendance, but he didn't do a good job of repre
...they are training simulators, but not "labs." While you can virtualize a server, and teach useful concepts to someone studying to be a certified technician or a computer scientist, you can't effectively virtualize a physics experiment or a dissection and call that a lab experience. Sure, you might teach some of the underlying concepts (which you could also do with, say, a slide presentation), you can't teach some kinds of muscle memory, nor can you convey things like subtle telltale odors (useful in chemistry), or subtle changes in the texture of certain tissues.
Telling the student that these subtle cues exist is not good enough. They need to experience some things first-hand so they know them in their bones.
Anatomy and physics classes were done via simulations on the computers. This is fine for anything short of becoming an actual nurse or doctor, or physicist, none of which were even close to being thought about being offered by the school.
Cadaver labs are indispensible, not just to nurses and doctors, but even to massage therapists! Knowing how real muscles and organs look in a real body (and not some sanitized or idealized textbook), or even how they feel, is a necessity for doing your job well. Shortchanging students by taking away real dissection labs is a crime, because they are learning how a synthetic representation of a living thing is put together, not how a real living thing is put together. Trying to sell the removal of dissections from the science curriculum as a win for compassion might gain you some traction, but it will make future generations even more out-of-touch with the skills they'll need should they want to become doctors. I see this virtualization trend in colleges as an extension of the trend to take real chemistry, biology, and physics labs out of high schools.
Computer simulations of physics experiments? Those are useful for predicting the outcome of a proposed experiment that nobody's ever done before... but not so much as a teaching tool for well-known science. A simulation will likely only behave in the way it was programmed to behave. Real-world experiments, on the other hand, give you data that isn't always clean, and sometimes give you results that are totally "wrong" and require diagnostic skills for debugging the experimental apparatus. You might call making a student use these virtual labs a form of training, but you can't call it science. Ultimately, there's no "grounding" when you use a computer simulation -- how is the student supposed to understand that the science is real and has real-world practical implications? How is the student supposed to know that it's not all just some cooked-up fantasy? We have enough grief with flat-earthers and YECs trying to get real science taken out of classrooms. Moving to this style of education for "the masses" will only exacerbate that problem, creating a whole class of people who potentially don't believe anything or don't understand anything about the technology that is used all around them.
I wish I had the mod points to give you. As usual, circletimessquare spouts off against a particular dislike for some entity, advocates for something that nobody apparently cares about in the real world, and conveniently ignores the facts on the ground... like the inconvenient fact that nobody else (who counts) supports this supposed RSS Opensearch standard. Including Windows Live Search.
I mean, how sensible is it to pillory Google for not supporting some externally-generated standard, which would supposedly make them more inter-operable with Microsoft's net-nanny product, when Microsoft itself doesn't support the standard in their primary search engine? That neither Yahoo nor Ask.com support this standard is just icing on the cake.
For the love of all that is just, can someone mod up the parent?
That's an awesome resource! There's also a link provided in that blog article to another article in which the author gives us another nifty utility, PrivBar, which lets you know whether you're surfing in IE under admin privileges or not. Works well with the MakeMeAdmin script you mentioned.
This is the second time someone has brought up the whole Baptist thing (that I've seen).
You do remember your history, right? You know what the Louisiana Purchase is, and where we bought that land from, right? You know the people settled there were French, and most French people (even in the New World) are Catholic, right?
Here are two sources for demographic data: Wikipedia's Louisiana article and this blog entry summarizing a survey. If you believe Wikipedia, then 30% of Louisiana is Catholic overall, and 38% is Baptist -- not that this is all Baptist groups, not just one group calling itself Baptist. If you believe the survey, then 28% of the state's population is Catholic, and 31% is "evangelical," which includes Baptists -- again, this category is a catch-all, and isn't just one group calling itself Baptist.
So while the Catholic Church is considered one monolithic organization, the Baptists are not. That's another thing to consider when looking at those numbers.
As the person to whom you responded wrote, the Catholic population is heavy in the south of the state... which should be no big surprise, as that's where New Orleans is.
Not sure why you'd conflate Creole and Baptist. Creole could just as likely mean a practitioner of Voodoo (seriously) as a member of any other religion. That said, most Creole who practice Voodoo are also nominally Catholics.
Again, the relevance here is that the Catholic Church is very obviously sponsoring this legislation. The Archbishop specifically petitioned for it, as did the Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Your "out of touch" comments are spot-on. This is really just pandering to a particular religious group. I suspect if this passes, someone in Louisiana is going to get convicted for violating this law in a way that nobody foresaw... causing a great outcry from some quarters to either repeal or modify the law. But by that point, it'll be too late.
Louisiana is a majority baptist area. If you're going to bash Christian sects, at least have the decency to pick the right one!
Culturally, New Orleans and the surrounding areas are heavily Catholic. The French history of Louisiana cannot be denied.
Additionally, you don't supply any numbers, so I checked Wikipedia. The percentage of Catholics is 30%, and the percentage of Baptists (all groups calling themselves Baptist) is 38% -- not exactly the overwhelming majority you're making it out to be, and the two groups are statistically close. Don't like Wikipedia? Fine, here's another source. According to this article, 31% of the state's residents are "evangelical," which includes Baptists, while 28% are Catholic. Again, both groups are pretty close, though note the even smaller difference in this set of figures.
The point is, trying to say Louisiana is majority Baptist is disingenuous and ignores the cultural heritage of Louisiana. Mardi Gras is a French/Creole phenomenon, and that group is almost entirely Catholic.
Furthermore, the article linked in the summary clearly states that this legislation was submitted at the request of the Catholic Church (via Archbishop Alfred Hughes and the Conference of Catholic Bishops). If you'd take the time to read TFA, you'd realize that the person you're responding to is "bashing" the right sect, because that's the religious sect mentioned in the article. All this blather about Baptists sounds like a pissing contest to me. Really, dude, why do you care so much about your narrow world view that you need to try to hijack this thread with some pointless diversion about a religious group not mentioned in the fucking article? Because you're pissed off that someone suggested a different religious group has more political power than yours does?
OK, so the summary already is a source of hilarity to me... "eminent danger"? Eminent means prominent, distinguished, or noteworthy. The correct phrase here is likely "imminent danger." Based on that, and the comments in TFA (most of which were riddled with similar typos and malapropisms, many of which were bemoaning the state of education in Louisiana, and some of which fell under both of the previous two categories), it seems to me that Louisiana should be working extra hard to try and funnel more money into education, not cut it. Yeah, comments in TFA brought up the topic of cutting funding for education in Louisiana.
It should also be noted that this bill is being promoted heavily by the Catholic Church. TFA takes pains to also talk about a medical conscience bill that would protect doctors, pharmacists, etc., from repercussions if they opt not to participate in any procedure that violates their conscience or faith. In other words, this would allow pharmacists to refuse to prescribe the morning-after pill if they oppose abortion. It's worth noting that TFA is a bit slanted in its coverage -- it does not, for example, discuss whether the claims of equivalence between the morning-after pill and abortion are in fact valid. (Other news sources have openly questioned the validity of this comparison, usually citing opposing viewpoints.)
I'm hoping there will be an intelligent discussion here about the dangers of setting up different classes of organisms for experimentation -- those who are fair game for genetic experiments and in-depth analysis of fundamental cellular mechanisms, and those who are not. Reasonable scientists might point out, for instance, all the benefits of using a hybrid approach to solve a vexing technical issue, even if that's just a stopgap measure. They might also warn of the dangers of missing out on crucial insights because we're not working with material sufficiently close to our own genes and cells. But instead, I fear this whole thing is going to degenerate into a bunch of jokes about furries...
That said, some of the comments in TFA about mermaids and "centars" were hilarious.:-)
...in TFA. The article says that for users who are not logged in (or who don't have any Digg account), the Digg bar should not appear at all:
All anonymous users, those not logged into Digg.com, will now be taken directly to the publishers content via a permanent redirect - no toolbar, no frames.
I just tried surfing to a Digg-linked site, and the toolbar still appeared. I can confirm that I am not logged in to Digg, and I've tried this with IE6 and Firefox 3.x.
What I do see is a little disclosure widget appear when I mouse over the close box for the Digg bar. (Hey, at least the close widget is there -- a couple days ago, it mysteriously stopped appearing, making it impossible to remove the Digg bar.) Clicking on the disclosure widget reveals a link to "always hide" the toolbar.
So, it would appear that, unless Digg still needs to roll out their changes, they are not playing by the rules described in TFA. Requiring the end user to opt out when they're not even a Digg member is not exactly in the spirit of their supposed new rules (and apparent agreement with other site owners). It's also not obvious how this opt-out nonsense works unless you're one of those people who obsessively mouses over every square millimeter of screen real-estate. Even then, you need to know that the little chevron-ish icon that shows up is what you need to click.
For me, the Digg bar was very obtrusive. I'm forced to use IE6 at work, and when the Digg bar shows up on that browser on my work system (Win XP SP2), it causes unacceptable graphical tearing and glitches in the page it's wrapping. If I scroll down, I had better not scroll back up because I wanted to see something at the top of the page.
Furthermore, when I first noticed the Digg bar showing up on sites I visited via Digg, it was pretty easy to get rid of the bar -- one click to an obvious-looking close button widget and it was gone. A few days ago, I seemed to no longer have the ability to even get rid of the bar, which (combined with the aforementioned graphical problems) is what made it so annoying to me.
As a developer who slings a lot of web-based applications, I have been operating for years with the understanding that it's considered bad form to use frames and iframes, and especially bad form to wrap someone else's content in one of your frames. Most web sites (and the entities that operate them) don't like it when you include their site contents inside yours using frames -- there are legal concerns, concerns about obfuscating the URL so the end user is confused, concerns over the mis-appropriation of others' copyrighted material, concerns over the appearance vs. reality of content ownership (i.e., making someone else's work appear to be yours), and technical considerations, among other issues.
One such technical consideration is that most sites are authored assuming that they pretty much own the root of the DOM, and things like the Digg bar break that assumption. It's not an unreasonable assumption to make, especially since it simplifies your JavaScript and navigation logic. I recall testing out free WiFi at several airports, including Denver International. The Denver system would intercept your HTTP requests and decorate the page you were trying to load with their own ad-laden HTML, which would then wrap your desired site inside a frame. Their stuff mostly worked, but occasionally would bork my browser or cause multiple instances of ad bars and other detritus to be loaded around the page I wanted to see. In some cases, the web site I was viewing came up completely scrambled. (This was on a MacBook Pro running both Safari and Firefox 2.x. I did try both.)
My understanding is that you're still prohibited from spawning your own threads inside of an EJB, but you're not prohibited elsewhere (e.g., inside a servlet or a Struts action). I recall reading that some of these restrictions had been relaxed, but I don't know many details. My company shifted away from using EJBs because we really only used them for transactioning, and we can get the same benefit by using Spring (which is way more lightweight). There's only one app I can think of that's still using any sort of EJB, and that's using message driven beans.
Interesting info with respect to threading. What I find weird is that Thread and related classes, including most or all of java.util.concurrent, are present in the white list linked from TFA. Of course, there are static methods on Thread to do non-destructive, non-management-esque things with the currently executing thread, but what's the point of making ThreadPoolExecutor available if you can't create one? Even the Executors factory methods hand you back various versions of Executors (including ThreadPoolExecutor) that can spawn new threads. The restrictions you cite would make it seem that these classes can't be used at all, even though they're in the white list. Very strange.
Slashdot Mirror
In fairness, if you RTFA you'd know that they specifically discourage the use of their system to evaluate paintings and hand-drawn artwork; the system is instead meant to evaluate color photographs.
The DX has a built-in PDF reader, and has the ability to side-load the files onto the device. A small but worthwhile improvement.
I can think of one. H. Beam Piper committed suicide in 1964. In an introduction to one of his books (which had been given to me by a fellow science fiction enthusiast in my youth), obviously written posthumously by a friend (Pournelle maybe?), the circumstances were laid out in saddening detail. The poor bastard had been reduced to shooting pigeons out of his window for food. He probably killed himself in despair over his career, although the Wikipedia article mentions that his beliefs were in fact partly erroneous, as Piper was unaware of some book sales.
The Wikipedia article also does mention that Piper was hugely influential, mostly of other science fiction writers. I'd argue that Piper was a "genre giant" who died in poverty.
I'm sure other enterprising souls out there can think of more examples.
It seems, though, that the article you reference has backpedaled on that claim:
So it would seem that this oft-repeated wisdom of the masses is in fact wrong, and the Core 2 Quad Q8400 has VT support after all.
In fairness, though, it's true that PC ports are a heckuva lot easier on the Xbox 360, because of the exceedingly similar development model, compared to the PS3, which is far more ... idiosyncratic.
It's also possible that some developers were paid more to make the Xbox 360 version or port of a game superior. Or that they were paid to effectively castrate the PS3 version. (I'm looking at you, Bethesda... Not a day goes by that I don't hear one of my friends complaining about how the PS3 version of Fallout 3 is now abandonware and won't be getting the latest patches/bugfixes, never mind the exclusive content that Microsoft paid them to make for the Xbox 360.)
Who is "everyone"? What makes the Xbox 360's graphics chip "better"? What definition of "better" are we using?
It's the old engineering tradeoff -- more general purpose cores or more special purpose processors that can offload certain tasks? In point of fact, while the Xbox 360 has 3 PowerPC cores which are equivalent to the single core of the Cell chip in the PS3, there are certain tasks performed by the SPEs on the Cell which all of the general-purpose cores of the Xbox chip put together couldn't execute in a reasonable amount of time. Media decoding and decompression tasks are a dream on the SPEs. (That the PS3 can fully decode both Blu-Ray and multi-channel SACD media with no effort is pretty amazing.) It's also worth noting that, while the SPEs are kind of like DSP cores, they're not nearly as specialized as some of the custom chips in previous generations of game consoles and computers.
Which is it? Does the game performance prove it, or are you relying on anecdotal evidence? Or do you mean that you believe the game performance of the Xbox 360 is better because your friends tell you? Again, who is "everyone"?
It does appear that some developers with existing code bases had an easier time porting to the Xbox 360 than to the PS3 -- I'm thinking of Orange Box specifically. Shouldn't be any surprise, since the Xbox 360 adheres more closely to a traditional development model that PC game developers have been using for years.
In short, if you care about your game console not going belly-up on you after a few months, you're probably better off with a PS3. If you want something that can be more than just a game console, you want a PS3. You can argue graphical quality all day long, though honestly the vast majority of PS3 titles look better to me than their Xbox 360 equivalents, with few exceptions. In the end, some of us care more about being able to play a game to completion without our consoles dying on us than in some retarded chest-thumping session or belonging to the biggest tribe of gamers who need external validation.
Hmm, maybe reliability is what some people mean when they say the PS3 has better hardware?
Dude, you keep pimping your crazy vector processing "idea" and that particular blog entry non-stop. I know I've been accused of this in the past, so this may come off as hypocritical, but cripes, learn how to not be a one-issue commenter who hijacks any story or thread to try and promote your own brand of crazy. (And just FYI, I read your "How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis" article... blog rant... whatever you want to call it. You don't articulate your ideas very well, and you don't provide a rigorous mathematical foundation for your arguments.)
Oh, and the "last century multithreaded programming model" is no less deterministic than the kind of vector processing you're promoting... unless you really abuse the definition of "deterministic" to mean only what you want it to mean. It's just that two or more threads won't run in lock-step with each other, so locking and synchronization techniques must be employed in cases where ordering is important. When you consider that some workloads naturally take longer to complete than others, or that parallel workloads may require intermediate results from each other, it's easy to see how a vector processing system that enforced the programming model you endorse would easily lead to inefficiencies of hardware utilization. Easier to program, but more profligate with use of energy, among other things.
And this is a fallacy that gets repeated a lot. Just because something is popular (computer language, video tape format, currency, etc.) doesn't mean it's good, or that it's good for you. Things become popular through a combination of factors, and dumb luck seems to be pretty high on the list. There are many cases where the "best" solution loses out to the cheaper solution that's "good enough."
Another thing to consider is what you mean by "good" (or "great" to use your wording). If you're doing government contract work and you're asked to write software, you may be forced to use ADA (or some other DOD approved language) because nothing else meets the stringent requirements of your employer. In short, nothing else is "good enough."
Arguing from popularity is a common logical fallacy. As it stands, it seems clear that the popularity of Objective C (or the lack of popularity) is due to a lack of traction with popular operating systems (i.e., Windows), and the only reason developers are even looking at Objective C now is that Apple has effectively forced iPhone developers to use Objective C -- in other words, the iPhone's popularity has forced developers to take a look (or a second look). Since there's nothing stopping developers from incorporating C and C++ code and libraries into their Objective C applications, I don't see what the big deal is?
The article only briefly touches on the 1802, which was a ground-breaking chip that found its way into satellites and control systems for just about every kind of military gear you could think of.
I built a Cosmac Elf as a science fair project in high school, and it was a blast. The heart was an 1802 processor -- I didn't get the rad-hardened version in the ceramic package, which would have cost far more than my shoestring budget could afford, but the plastic package version instead. The design was already old when I started wire wrapping this thing, so some parts had to be replaced with improvised versions (e.g., the hexadecimal display chips that had dot-matrix LEDs on the top face, and took a nybble as input -- had to replace those with 8 discrete LEDs and read output in straight binary).
One of the things I liked about the 1802 is that it had TTL outputs with enough juice to drive certain control circuits without a bunch of extra coupling hardware. (Some low power devices could be driven directly, and everything else just needed a cheap transistor. I drove relays with this thing.) There were also inputs to which you could directly attach some analog domain sensors, such as a photoresistor.
Sorry to see the 1802 didn't make the list, but at least they included the 555 and the 741.
Surprised they didn't mention that the 68000 was one of the few CPUs to use a nanocode architecture to decode microcode operations, in order to reduce the chip real-estate used for storing decode logic -- in my grad level CPU architecture class, the technique was likened to using two smaller ROMs and a bit of clever logic to replace one huge ROM. (And when I took 6.004 as an undergrad, we actually built a discrete component computer using this exact same technique -- one EPROM was for the nanocode interpreter, and two served the microcode interpreter. Oddly enough, we were told by our professor, "This technique would never be used in the real world." Maybe not in 1993, but the 68000 has an older pedigree, and was apparently one of the last few chips to be designed by hand. If I were those guys, I too would be using every trick and cheat to reduce transistor count.)
Not to nit-pick, but the very link you gave shows that the film was not directed (or produced) by John Carpenter, but was directed by Jack Sholder.
Same here on a Vista 64 system last night. IE8 showed up as an "Important" update for me, not critical -- only XP users will see it as a critical update. I chose a custom install, and was indeed prompted every step of the way; I just had to click on the appropriate radio buttons, or an occasional checkbox, to get what I wanted. Once complete, none of my settings were altered.
One annoying thing I noticed about PrivBar is that both the x86 and x64 versions seem to behave differently after the upgrade to IE8. Checked Aaron Margosis' blog, and one of the latest comments on this blog entry describes the problem, and the author of PrivBar actually responded to the comment with news that he's working on a new version that works around the IE8 "bug":
One of the most useful things about PrivBar, besides providing a visual indicator of which version of IE you're using (32 or 64 bit) and what your privilege level is, is that it displayed the user ID the process is running under. That's really important from a security standpoint.
But the Federation had a war with the Romulans in an earlier era, using more primitive weapons (some type of nuclear device). Just because nobody in the Federation had ever seen a Romulan face-to-face (or face-to-viewscreen) doesn't mean that the Federation had no prior dealings with the Romulans. There is definite dialog from Kirk and Spock, as well as other ancillary characters, from that very episode which explains all this.
Besides, this movie is in a separate time line and a separate continuity, so you shouldn't expect the timeline of this film to correlate too closely with TOS.
First off, it's rogue. Rouge is makeup you apply to your cheeks (or anywhere else you want a "healthy blush").
Secondly, if you actually paid attention to the episodes in question (a story arc that lasted 2 or 3 episodes), you would know that the Klingons were going to destroy the research facility to stop the spread of this viral trait. A cure was discovered, and the Klingon powers that be relented. Klingons on a single colony were affected by this trait, and it was implied that the Klingon scientists were going to have their hands full reversing this genetic mangling. It did not spread to the entire Klingon empire.
Yeah, I know, way too much nit picking about a damn TV show. But I thought the story arc was cool, especially the idea that Noonian Soong's ancestor was actually originally interested in genetic engineering to enhance humans, not robotics or cybernetics.
Just to add my voice to the throng, I own this mouse and use it extensively with my MacBook Pro. For me, a USB dongle was simply not an option because there are times when I need those USB ports for something else, or when the port is physically blocked because I'm working under less-than-ideal conditions.
The Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 solved most of my problems. It's a great basic mouse. The only caveat is that it only has a single extra mouse button (besides the right and left and the clickable scroll wheel), but that suits my needs just fine. Under OS X, I have the 4th mouse button bound to show/hide the dashboard, which is great because I have a dashboard widget that lets me do photo uploads and requires that I drag icons from the desktop and drop them onto the dashboard widget. (That's not a maneuver I'd want to attempt with just the keyboard and the trackpad!)
Under World of Warcraft, that 4th mouse button will toggle autorun (and this works under both OS X and Vista). The mouse is great for gaming as well as "serious" work. Battery life is great. Waking up from sleep takes a few seconds, but I've only had that happen when I went AFK for a while.
My fiancee has an HP laptop running Vista, and she uses the same mouse. We can both be using our mice paired with our respective laptops in the same room and not have problems with interference, which is a good sign. She plays WoW a lot more than I do, so she has invested in rechargeable batteries for the mouse.
It might help your argument if you actually, you know, knew the substance of the Dawkins lecture in Oklahoma before commenting on it. But then you wouldn't have much to say, because Dawkins' lecture wasn't nearly as controversial as you'd like to think. Or hope. I'll go into that more in a moment, but first...
Again, you might want to actually read the text of the resolution so you could actually be well informed as to what the resolution said. It was a resolution, not a censure statement -- and no, that's not hair splitting, it's a difference with meaning. The resolution says nothing about time for "competing theories," in fact, although it calls for an "open, dignified, and fair discussion of the Darwinian [sic] theory of evolution and all other scientific theories" and then proceeds to tell OU how it ought to be conducting the business of science.
The resolution does explicitly state that the Oklahoma legislature opposed Dawkins' visit because of the statments he's made about evolution and the opinions he's expressed about those who do not agree with his viewpoint. That's awfully "noble" of them, until you start to question why the Oklahoma legislature hasn't condemned any fundamentalist Christian clergy for the patently offensive statements they've made about the theory of evolution and its adherents. The difference here seems to be that the Oklahoma legislature thinks that mob rule serves as justification for asymmetric treatment.
Then there's the little detail that after the lecture, the legislators who engineered the aforementioned resolution weren't satisfied, and decided to go on a witch hunt because the university had the audacity to not bow to political pressure. Doesn't this response seem just a bit lacking in proportion? Or is that "justified" because you think Dawkins is a dirty name-caller?
The sad thing is, people like you actually believe this crap that you spew, and think it makes a dandy justification. Fortunately, Dawkins and some of his apologists actually addressed this issue. But before I touch on that larger issue, I want to point out that despite your characterization of the man giving the lecture, the substance of the lecture was far less polarizing than you might imagine, and it was very well received by the audience with the exception of one man. You can read a summary of the lecture here and here (although I think PZ Meyers would have been better served by avoiding the kind of editorial comments he made in that second link, even though it's his blog and he can say whatever he damn well pleases). The one man who made a scene may or may not have been the only creationist in attendance, but he didn't do a good job of repre
...they are training simulators, but not "labs." While you can virtualize a server, and teach useful concepts to someone studying to be a certified technician or a computer scientist, you can't effectively virtualize a physics experiment or a dissection and call that a lab experience. Sure, you might teach some of the underlying concepts (which you could also do with, say, a slide presentation), you can't teach some kinds of muscle memory, nor can you convey things like subtle telltale odors (useful in chemistry), or subtle changes in the texture of certain tissues.
Telling the student that these subtle cues exist is not good enough. They need to experience some things first-hand so they know them in their bones.
Cadaver labs are indispensible, not just to nurses and doctors, but even to massage therapists! Knowing how real muscles and organs look in a real body (and not some sanitized or idealized textbook), or even how they feel, is a necessity for doing your job well. Shortchanging students by taking away real dissection labs is a crime, because they are learning how a synthetic representation of a living thing is put together, not how a real living thing is put together. Trying to sell the removal of dissections from the science curriculum as a win for compassion might gain you some traction, but it will make future generations even more out-of-touch with the skills they'll need should they want to become doctors. I see this virtualization trend in colleges as an extension of the trend to take real chemistry, biology, and physics labs out of high schools.
Computer simulations of physics experiments? Those are useful for predicting the outcome of a proposed experiment that nobody's ever done before... but not so much as a teaching tool for well-known science. A simulation will likely only behave in the way it was programmed to behave. Real-world experiments, on the other hand, give you data that isn't always clean, and sometimes give you results that are totally "wrong" and require diagnostic skills for debugging the experimental apparatus. You might call making a student use these virtual labs a form of training, but you can't call it science. Ultimately, there's no "grounding" when you use a computer simulation -- how is the student supposed to understand that the science is real and has real-world practical implications? How is the student supposed to know that it's not all just some cooked-up fantasy? We have enough grief with flat-earthers and YECs trying to get real science taken out of classrooms. Moving to this style of education for "the masses" will only exacerbate that problem, creating a whole class of people who potentially don't believe anything or don't understand anything about the technology that is used all around them.
I wish I had the mod points to give you. As usual, circletimessquare spouts off against a particular dislike for some entity, advocates for something that nobody apparently cares about in the real world, and conveniently ignores the facts on the ground... like the inconvenient fact that nobody else (who counts) supports this supposed RSS Opensearch standard. Including Windows Live Search.
I mean, how sensible is it to pillory Google for not supporting some externally-generated standard, which would supposedly make them more inter-operable with Microsoft's net-nanny product, when Microsoft itself doesn't support the standard in their primary search engine? That neither Yahoo nor Ask.com support this standard is just icing on the cake.
For the love of all that is just, can someone mod up the parent?
That's an awesome resource! There's also a link provided in that blog article to another article in which the author gives us another nifty utility, PrivBar, which lets you know whether you're surfing in IE under admin privileges or not. Works well with the MakeMeAdmin script you mentioned.
This is the second time someone has brought up the whole Baptist thing (that I've seen).
You do remember your history, right? You know what the Louisiana Purchase is, and where we bought that land from, right? You know the people settled there were French, and most French people (even in the New World) are Catholic, right?
Here are two sources for demographic data: Wikipedia's Louisiana article and this blog entry summarizing a survey. If you believe Wikipedia, then 30% of Louisiana is Catholic overall, and 38% is Baptist -- not that this is all Baptist groups, not just one group calling itself Baptist. If you believe the survey, then 28% of the state's population is Catholic, and 31% is "evangelical," which includes Baptists -- again, this category is a catch-all, and isn't just one group calling itself Baptist.
So while the Catholic Church is considered one monolithic organization, the Baptists are not. That's another thing to consider when looking at those numbers.
As the person to whom you responded wrote, the Catholic population is heavy in the south of the state... which should be no big surprise, as that's where New Orleans is.
Not sure why you'd conflate Creole and Baptist. Creole could just as likely mean a practitioner of Voodoo (seriously) as a member of any other religion. That said, most Creole who practice Voodoo are also nominally Catholics.
Again, the relevance here is that the Catholic Church is very obviously sponsoring this legislation. The Archbishop specifically petitioned for it, as did the Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Your "out of touch" comments are spot-on. This is really just pandering to a particular religious group. I suspect if this passes, someone in Louisiana is going to get convicted for violating this law in a way that nobody foresaw... causing a great outcry from some quarters to either repeal or modify the law. But by that point, it'll be too late.
Culturally, New Orleans and the surrounding areas are heavily Catholic. The French history of Louisiana cannot be denied.
Additionally, you don't supply any numbers, so I checked Wikipedia. The percentage of Catholics is 30%, and the percentage of Baptists (all groups calling themselves Baptist) is 38% -- not exactly the overwhelming majority you're making it out to be, and the two groups are statistically close. Don't like Wikipedia? Fine, here's another source. According to this article, 31% of the state's residents are "evangelical," which includes Baptists, while 28% are Catholic. Again, both groups are pretty close, though note the even smaller difference in this set of figures.
The point is, trying to say Louisiana is majority Baptist is disingenuous and ignores the cultural heritage of Louisiana. Mardi Gras is a French/Creole phenomenon, and that group is almost entirely Catholic.
Furthermore, the article linked in the summary clearly states that this legislation was submitted at the request of the Catholic Church (via Archbishop Alfred Hughes and the Conference of Catholic Bishops). If you'd take the time to read TFA, you'd realize that the person you're responding to is "bashing" the right sect, because that's the religious sect mentioned in the article. All this blather about Baptists sounds like a pissing contest to me. Really, dude, why do you care so much about your narrow world view that you need to try to hijack this thread with some pointless diversion about a religious group not mentioned in the fucking article? Because you're pissed off that someone suggested a different religious group has more political power than yours does?
In short, do try to keep it on topic, m'kay?
OK, so the summary already is a source of hilarity to me... "eminent danger"? Eminent means prominent, distinguished, or noteworthy. The correct phrase here is likely "imminent danger." Based on that, and the comments in TFA (most of which were riddled with similar typos and malapropisms, many of which were bemoaning the state of education in Louisiana, and some of which fell under both of the previous two categories), it seems to me that Louisiana should be working extra hard to try and funnel more money into education, not cut it. Yeah, comments in TFA brought up the topic of cutting funding for education in Louisiana.
It should also be noted that this bill is being promoted heavily by the Catholic Church. TFA takes pains to also talk about a medical conscience bill that would protect doctors, pharmacists, etc., from repercussions if they opt not to participate in any procedure that violates their conscience or faith. In other words, this would allow pharmacists to refuse to prescribe the morning-after pill if they oppose abortion. It's worth noting that TFA is a bit slanted in its coverage -- it does not, for example, discuss whether the claims of equivalence between the morning-after pill and abortion are in fact valid. (Other news sources have openly questioned the validity of this comparison, usually citing opposing viewpoints.)
I'm hoping there will be an intelligent discussion here about the dangers of setting up different classes of organisms for experimentation -- those who are fair game for genetic experiments and in-depth analysis of fundamental cellular mechanisms, and those who are not. Reasonable scientists might point out, for instance, all the benefits of using a hybrid approach to solve a vexing technical issue, even if that's just a stopgap measure. They might also warn of the dangers of missing out on crucial insights because we're not working with material sufficiently close to our own genes and cells. But instead, I fear this whole thing is going to degenerate into a bunch of jokes about furries...
That said, some of the comments in TFA about mermaids and "centars" were hilarious. :-)
...in TFA. The article says that for users who are not logged in (or who don't have any Digg account), the Digg bar should not appear at all:
I just tried surfing to a Digg-linked site, and the toolbar still appeared. I can confirm that I am not logged in to Digg, and I've tried this with IE6 and Firefox 3.x.
What I do see is a little disclosure widget appear when I mouse over the close box for the Digg bar. (Hey, at least the close widget is there -- a couple days ago, it mysteriously stopped appearing, making it impossible to remove the Digg bar.) Clicking on the disclosure widget reveals a link to "always hide" the toolbar.
So, it would appear that, unless Digg still needs to roll out their changes, they are not playing by the rules described in TFA. Requiring the end user to opt out when they're not even a Digg member is not exactly in the spirit of their supposed new rules (and apparent agreement with other site owners). It's also not obvious how this opt-out nonsense works unless you're one of those people who obsessively mouses over every square millimeter of screen real-estate. Even then, you need to know that the little chevron-ish icon that shows up is what you need to click.
For me, the Digg bar was very obtrusive. I'm forced to use IE6 at work, and when the Digg bar shows up on that browser on my work system (Win XP SP2), it causes unacceptable graphical tearing and glitches in the page it's wrapping. If I scroll down, I had better not scroll back up because I wanted to see something at the top of the page.
Furthermore, when I first noticed the Digg bar showing up on sites I visited via Digg, it was pretty easy to get rid of the bar -- one click to an obvious-looking close button widget and it was gone. A few days ago, I seemed to no longer have the ability to even get rid of the bar, which (combined with the aforementioned graphical problems) is what made it so annoying to me.
As a developer who slings a lot of web-based applications, I have been operating for years with the understanding that it's considered bad form to use frames and iframes, and especially bad form to wrap someone else's content in one of your frames. Most web sites (and the entities that operate them) don't like it when you include their site contents inside yours using frames -- there are legal concerns, concerns about obfuscating the URL so the end user is confused, concerns over the mis-appropriation of others' copyrighted material, concerns over the appearance vs. reality of content ownership (i.e., making someone else's work appear to be yours), and technical considerations, among other issues.
One such technical consideration is that most sites are authored assuming that they pretty much own the root of the DOM, and things like the Digg bar break that assumption. It's not an unreasonable assumption to make, especially since it simplifies your JavaScript and navigation logic. I recall testing out free WiFi at several airports, including Denver International. The Denver system would intercept your HTTP requests and decorate the page you were trying to load with their own ad-laden HTML, which would then wrap your desired site inside a frame. Their stuff mostly worked, but occasionally would bork my browser or cause multiple instances of ad bars and other detritus to be loaded around the page I wanted to see. In some cases, the web site I was viewing came up completely scrambled. (This was on a MacBook Pro running both Safari and Firefox 2.x. I did try both.)
My understanding is that you're still prohibited from spawning your own threads inside of an EJB, but you're not prohibited elsewhere (e.g., inside a servlet or a Struts action). I recall reading that some of these restrictions had been relaxed, but I don't know many details. My company shifted away from using EJBs because we really only used them for transactioning, and we can get the same benefit by using Spring (which is way more lightweight). There's only one app I can think of that's still using any sort of EJB, and that's using message driven beans.
Interesting info with respect to threading. What I find weird is that Thread and related classes, including most or all of java.util.concurrent, are present in the white list linked from TFA. Of course, there are static methods on Thread to do non-destructive, non-management-esque things with the currently executing thread, but what's the point of making ThreadPoolExecutor available if you can't create one? Even the Executors factory methods hand you back various versions of Executors (including ThreadPoolExecutor) that can spawn new threads. The restrictions you cite would make it seem that these classes can't be used at all, even though they're in the white list. Very strange.