Damn straight, Kohath. Music is entertainment. Why should we ridicule people for that? It's like we're trying to get back at them for making fun of us in junior high.
To jump in here (because it looks like fun, and I'm bored), let's consider some classic scifi, shall we?
First, there's Asimov, who had not merely one plot, but dozens, based on "positronic brains". Talk about pseudoscience -- there's no property of positrons that would suggest that they ought to be used for any kind of control system at all, much less a brain. And the "positronic field mathematics" behind the Laws were nothing more than mumbo-jumbo.
How about Heinlein? Don't even get me started! Besides telepathy, "semantics", and an often bizarre approach to sociology, let's consider the scene in _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ where the computer explains that, although their calculated odds of success have dropped from 1 in 7 to 1 in 100, things are actually going well, and they are merely at a critical stage. Baloney! For the odds to drop, new, bad data would have to come to light.
For Star Wars, let's consider the Death Star! Now, we know that the energy beam is NOT faster than light, as we see it and it's not that fast. So after destroying one planet, how is it possibly a threat to others? Don't tell me it can travel faster than light, either, because it doesn't bother to run away when it's attacked. Are we supposed to believe that all these planets are in the same star system? If so, why do all the stars move when you go through hyperspace from one planet to another?
No, in a year, if you want a new computer you will have to buy a Mac. A "PC" will have been crippled into something akin to a game console, apparently.
Yes, and it was reincarnated (to some degree) with PAE, which is the extension that allows your 32-bit processor to have (I believe) a 36-bit address space. This is generally necessary for machines with more than 3GB of physical RAM.
Well, last I checked,/bin/true on Solaris was a shell script that consisted entirely of a 20-line comment stating that "this is unreleased proprietary source code".
Well, I had a college professor tell me that the use of the dash should be carefully constrained, lest it lose its force through overuse. Twice in a short post would certainly be over her limits.
Also, isn't a jerk a person? So should it be "a pedantic jerk who"?
If the odds were 1 in 10,000 then it would be very unlikely for us to see such an event in a mere 100 launches (less than 1 percent). That's 1 percent in total, not 1 percent per launch. If the odds are 1 percent per launch then there is a 63% chance that the event will occur at least once over those hundred launches.
In this particular case, it is obvious that damage from foam insulation could have happened to any flight, and we may be just lucky that it didn't happen before now. It wasn't too uncommon for big chunks of foam to fall off, and it wasn't too uncommon for them to hit the orbiter. When you add in the fact that certain areas of the orbiter will be damaged catastrophically from a foam impact, you are led to the conclusion that this was a real problem, not a mere freak of chance.
Totally -- Blockbuster only has a "Guaranteed In-store" policy for the "new releases" section. Everything else can be missing for weeks on end and nobody cares.
What good is that? I looked over my Netflix rental history and the median release date was something like 1983. If you're in the mood for a classic, Netflix will have it, but Blockbuster likely only has one or two copies which may or may not be rented out. Lame.
I sort of thought we were talking about going to Blockbuster -- getting a beer with the buddies is something rather different, at least in my opinion. But when you started insulting me for completely irrelevant reasons I realized that we are actually talking about how unhappy you are, which is not a very interesting topic.
I prefer to interact with humans inside the house. See, I have this thing called a girlfriend and... well, I better not go into too much detail. Suffice it to say that, while going to Blockbuster is technically human interaction, it does not meet my standards.
Sure, you're completely right. Like I said, great for science or whatever. The question, though, refers to it as a potential mass market chip.
Of course, Itanium has always been referred to by Intel as a high-end chip, and never really as a mass-market one. Slashdotters, I suppose, are inherently the kind of people who think Space Shuttle main engines are useless because they can't have them in their cars.
I do think that Intel hoped Itanium would work out a little better than it did, though.
The odds that the odds are lower than 1% are reasonable. However, the odds that they are one in a million, or even one in a thousand, are fairly low. If the odds are 0.1% we would have only a 9.5% chance of such an event in a hundred launches. If the odds were one in ten thousand the 100-launch odds are less than 1%.
We know the odds for the lottery, but suppose I offer you a game with unknown odds. Let's see... you win! Do you think you can speculate on the odds for this game?
I think describing a foam insulation damage event as a "one in a million" problem cannot be supported by the facts.
I must note that there have only been about 100 shuttle flights. So the odds of foam damage were most likely a lot closer to 1% than 0.0001%.
I suppose that Rei will be around later to tell you all about how debris falloff is a common problem with rocket launches. As the shuttle orbiter is both fragile and mounted on the side, the possibility of debris damage should not have been ignored. In retrospect it was clearly a mistake, not just bad luck.
You misunderstand RISC. As do most people these days, it seems.
Back in the olden days, when chips were still designed by small teams on reasonable budgets, somebody noticed that hand-written assembly was rapidly becoming passe. When the assembly is being written by a compiler, it makes sense to design the chip with that in mind, and make an instruction set that is efficient at the kind of simple instructions that compilers like to write.
This led to a simpler design that could be made somewhat faster than a complex one. This led to many predicting the demise of so-called CISC chips. This prediction, like the "Internet in danger of collapse" and "Apple to go bankrupt" predictions, is no closer to actually happening than it was when it was first made.
The surprise was that Intel wanted a chip that had the speed advantages of RISC but used the same interface as their older chips, so they designed one. So they built a chip called the Pentium that translated CISC instructions into RISC ones. Since this operation is essentially O(n), they got good performance, and they've continued that basic design to the present day.
So to answer your question, it's already true that any operations that are not simple are emulated in software -- it's just that in x86 processors the emulation is on the CPU. Today there is no important difference between CISC and RISC, whether we are speaking of mainframes or desktops.
I've never seen any evidence that shareholders vote in their own interest or in any logical fashion at all. Rather, it seems to be the norm to let the executive team run the company. Shareholders often vote with their feet, but this doesn't directly control a company's decisions, especially since the shareholders who hold (or buy) are likely to be those that have faith in the executive team.
So individual choices might have more of an effect than you think. I remember an interview with an industry exec where he explained that his children (I think) had cystic fibrosis, and that gave him perspective that inspired him to push for new and better drugs.
I'm sure that it's marketing when an exec speaks like that, but that doesn't mean it's completely false. There are a lot of drug companies still, and it's reasonable to expect that some of them act purely in self-interest while others take a broader view. There are many successful companies in many industries where building a better world is part of the corporate strategy.
Perhaps I am merely being optimistic because I live essentially at the mercy of Wyeth-Ayerst and Fujisawa, but there you go.
So far there's been no evidence or good reason shown that Apple is interested in DRM processors. For at least the next three or four years the majority of Macs in use will be PowerPC-based. Apple cannot roll out a major new media initiative that only runs on 15% of Macs. If they are interested in processor-based DRM, they will have to wait until 2008 or 2009, which is way too long.
Alas, I told my boss "I have my priorities straight, so I need to stay home and feel sorry for the dead people in London" but he said something about how vacation time has to be approved a week in advance.
Re:Cliff's Notes: Start Using TCP Sequence Number
on
Examining ICMP Flaws
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, he didn't say YOU, he said "idiots like you".
But what he meant was that some incompetent network admins think that ICMP is only for pings, decide they don't want pings, and block ICMP completely at the firewall. ICMP is responsible for the "fragmentation needed" message which allows the sender to know when to use smaller packets to avoid fragmentation (which is generally bad).
Frustration with this issue leads people to lash out at those who don't seem to understand ICMP. I wouldn't take it too personally.
Slashdot Mirror
We're not talking about energy in the physics sense, but energy in the economics sense.
It takes gasoline to run those tractors, and electricity from fossil fuels to run the factories.
This study is saying, basically, that we'd be doing better if we just dumped that gasoline into our cars without messing around with ethanol.
This isn't true, according to Snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.htm/
This is a "troll"? How outrageously abusive.
Damn straight, Kohath. Music is entertainment. Why should we ridicule people for that? It's like we're trying to get back at them for making fun of us in junior high.
Let's remember that this is the NYT reporter who wrote stories citing that anonymous sources knew that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
To jump in here (because it looks like fun, and I'm bored), let's consider some classic scifi, shall we?
First, there's Asimov, who had not merely one plot, but dozens, based on "positronic brains". Talk about pseudoscience -- there's no property of positrons that would suggest that they ought to be used for any kind of control system at all, much less a brain. And the "positronic field mathematics" behind the Laws were nothing more than mumbo-jumbo.
How about Heinlein? Don't even get me started! Besides telepathy, "semantics", and an often bizarre approach to sociology, let's consider the scene in _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ where the computer explains that, although their calculated odds of success have dropped from 1 in 7 to 1 in 100, things are actually going well, and they are merely at a critical stage. Baloney! For the odds to drop, new, bad data would have to come to light.
For Star Wars, let's consider the Death Star! Now, we know that the energy beam is NOT faster than light, as we see it and it's not that fast. So after destroying one planet, how is it possibly a threat to others? Don't tell me it can travel faster than light, either, because it doesn't bother to run away when it's attacked. Are we supposed to believe that all these planets are in the same star system? If so, why do all the stars move when you go through hyperspace from one planet to another?
No, in a year, if you want a new computer you will have to buy a Mac. A "PC" will have been crippled into something akin to a game console, apparently.
Yes, and it was reincarnated (to some degree) with PAE, which is the extension that allows your 32-bit processor to have (I believe) a 36-bit address space. This is generally necessary for machines with more than 3GB of physical RAM.
Well, last I checked, /bin/true on Solaris was a shell script that consisted entirely of a 20-line comment stating that "this is unreleased proprietary source code".
I would hope F, as there is no such thing as -400 C.
Of course, this being NASA, "process" means PROCESS. There is a big complicated manual somewhere describing what is to be done and how and by whom.
It's sort of like if the people boarding the airplane had to play trumpets in perfect harmony or else they would fall down, catch fire, and die.
Well, I had a college professor tell me that the use of the dash should be carefully constrained, lest it lose its force through overuse. Twice in a short post would certainly be over her limits.
Also, isn't a jerk a person? So should it be "a pedantic jerk who"?
If the odds were 1 in 10,000 then it would be very unlikely for us to see such an event in a mere 100 launches (less than 1 percent). That's 1 percent in total, not 1 percent per launch. If the odds are 1 percent per launch then there is a 63% chance that the event will occur at least once over those hundred launches.
In this particular case, it is obvious that damage from foam insulation could have happened to any flight, and we may be just lucky that it didn't happen before now. It wasn't too uncommon for big chunks of foam to fall off, and it wasn't too uncommon for them to hit the orbiter. When you add in the fact that certain areas of the orbiter will be damaged catastrophically from a foam impact, you are led to the conclusion that this was a real problem, not a mere freak of chance.
Totally -- Blockbuster only has a "Guaranteed In-store" policy for the "new releases" section. Everything else can be missing for weeks on end and nobody cares.
What good is that? I looked over my Netflix rental history and the median release date was something like 1983. If you're in the mood for a classic, Netflix will have it, but Blockbuster likely only has one or two copies which may or may not be rented out. Lame.
I sort of thought we were talking about going to Blockbuster -- getting a beer with the buddies is something rather different, at least in my opinion. But when you started insulting me for completely irrelevant reasons I realized that we are actually talking about how unhappy you are, which is not a very interesting topic.
I prefer to interact with humans inside the house. See, I have this thing called a girlfriend and... well, I better not go into too much detail. Suffice it to say that, while going to Blockbuster is technically human interaction, it does not meet my standards.
Sure, you're completely right. Like I said, great for science or whatever. The question, though, refers to it as a potential mass market chip.
Of course, Itanium has always been referred to by Intel as a high-end chip, and never really as a mass-market one. Slashdotters, I suppose, are inherently the kind of people who think Space Shuttle main engines are useless because they can't have them in their cars.
I do think that Intel hoped Itanium would work out a little better than it did, though.
You have floating-point listed there, which is great for science I'm sure, but where are the integer numbers?
The odds that the odds are lower than 1% are reasonable. However, the odds that they are one in a million, or even one in a thousand, are fairly low. If the odds are 0.1% we would have only a 9.5% chance of such an event in a hundred launches. If the odds were one in ten thousand the 100-launch odds are less than 1%.
We know the odds for the lottery, but suppose I offer you a game with unknown odds. Let's see... you win! Do you think you can speculate on the odds for this game?
I think describing a foam insulation damage event as a "one in a million" problem cannot be supported by the facts.
I must note that there have only been about 100 shuttle flights. So the odds of foam damage were most likely a lot closer to 1% than 0.0001%.
I suppose that Rei will be around later to tell you all about how debris falloff is a common problem with rocket launches. As the shuttle orbiter is both fragile and mounted on the side, the possibility of debris damage should not have been ignored. In retrospect it was clearly a mistake, not just bad luck.
You misunderstand RISC. As do most people these days, it seems.
Back in the olden days, when chips were still designed by small teams on reasonable budgets, somebody noticed that hand-written assembly was rapidly becoming passe. When the assembly is being written by a compiler, it makes sense to design the chip with that in mind, and make an instruction set that is efficient at the kind of simple instructions that compilers like to write.
This led to a simpler design that could be made somewhat faster than a complex one. This led to many predicting the demise of so-called CISC chips. This prediction, like the "Internet in danger of collapse" and "Apple to go bankrupt" predictions, is no closer to actually happening than it was when it was first made.
The surprise was that Intel wanted a chip that had the speed advantages of RISC but used the same interface as their older chips, so they designed one. So they built a chip called the Pentium that translated CISC instructions into RISC ones. Since this operation is essentially O(n), they got good performance, and they've continued that basic design to the present day.
So to answer your question, it's already true that any operations that are not simple are emulated in software -- it's just that in x86 processors the emulation is on the CPU. Today there is no important difference between CISC and RISC, whether we are speaking of mainframes or desktops.
I've never seen any evidence that shareholders vote in their own interest or in any logical fashion at all. Rather, it seems to be the norm to let the executive team run the company. Shareholders often vote with their feet, but this doesn't directly control a company's decisions, especially since the shareholders who hold (or buy) are likely to be those that have faith in the executive team.
So individual choices might have more of an effect than you think. I remember an interview with an industry exec where he explained that his children (I think) had cystic fibrosis, and that gave him perspective that inspired him to push for new and better drugs.
I'm sure that it's marketing when an exec speaks like that, but that doesn't mean it's completely false. There are a lot of drug companies still, and it's reasonable to expect that some of them act purely in self-interest while others take a broader view. There are many successful companies in many industries where building a better world is part of the corporate strategy.
Perhaps I am merely being optimistic because I live essentially at the mercy of Wyeth-Ayerst and Fujisawa, but there you go.
So far there's been no evidence or good reason shown that Apple is interested in DRM processors. For at least the next three or four years the majority of Macs in use will be PowerPC-based. Apple cannot roll out a major new media initiative that only runs on 15% of Macs. If they are interested in processor-based DRM, they will have to wait until 2008 or 2009, which is way too long.
Alas, I told my boss "I have my priorities straight, so I need to stay home and feel sorry for the dead people in London" but he said something about how vacation time has to be approved a week in advance.
Well, he didn't say YOU, he said "idiots like you".
But what he meant was that some incompetent network admins think that ICMP is only for pings, decide they don't want pings, and block ICMP completely at the firewall. ICMP is responsible for the "fragmentation needed" message which allows the sender to know when to use smaller packets to avoid fragmentation (which is generally bad).
Frustration with this issue leads people to lash out at those who don't seem to understand ICMP. I wouldn't take it too personally.
My (great-*n)uncle was a pirate, you insensi... er, you dirty scalawag! Arrr!