I took math in college too. Put it down to senility.
Even the lower figure of 50K units seems quite decent for a $300 toy. It'll be interesting to see how much the new company can improve it with software updates, although I think the slow movement is a major handicap to making it seem very alive. Sony Aibo seemed to have more potential (realized at least in the form of Aibo Soccer).
According to TFA they did about $20M in sales before going belly-up. I don't know if that's wholesale or retail, but it must represent approx 500K-1M units, which doesn't seem too shabby. Presumably they could have sold a lot more if it had been more engaging and better delivered on the promises made.
It's not just visual voicemail (with automatic transciptions - read your voicemail if you want/need to be quiet) - that's just one feature.
The main feature of Google Voice, IMO, is that your Google Voice number is really YOUR number, not the number of a particular location/device. Via the web you can program what phone(s) - zero or more - ring when someone calls your GV number and you can pick up the call on any device. If you like all your calls can go direct to voicemail and you'll then pick them up either by phone or on the web.
The use of this is that you don't need to notify anyone if you go on vactation, change job, lose your cell phone, or whatever - they always call you at your GV number, and you choose where to pick the call up (maybe just at an internet cafe via the visual voicemail).
For some reason this story is tagged !supercomputer (as well as supercomputer), which seems downright churlish.
Sure NVidia's CUDA architecture is quite specialized and has some severe constaints, but OTOH so do any of these modern cluster-type supercomputers. Certain types of application map well onto these architectures and others don't. The CUDA architecture is certainly more constrained in terms of memory access per node and inter-node connectivity than say a cluster of Linux nodes.
OTOH, look at the downright mind-blowing maximum FLOP rating of this beast - 1,100,000,000,000 floating points ops per second!
Putting that in perspective I remember c.1980 when the DEC VAX was considered a very powerful department level computer given it's 1 (one) MFLOP rating - that's only one millionth of the power of this NVidia beasty!
Of course it remains to be seen what sort of FLOPS anyone can achieve in a real-world application on this, although presumably it would do pretty well on graphics rendering for which the architecture was originally designed.. be interesting to see how it compares on the types of graphics rendering that CRAY supercomputers were previously used for.
Dual boot is really a PITA unless you're hardly ever switching between OS's.
You're better off running a VM such as VirtualBox (free & recommended) in Windows and installing Ubuntu in that. You don't need to burn an Ubuntu CD image to install it - VirtualBox will let you mount the.iso file directly to a virtual CD drive. I'm sure most other VMs support this too.
They're not saying "it's identical", they're saying "architecturally, it's identical", which is to say that any differences are non-architectural (i.e. performance, power consumption, etc).
Perhaps a car analogy would help...
If I say that color-wise my Ford Pinto is identical to my Ferrari, all I'm saying is identical is the color!
Maybe what you meant was that it's not proof of what creationists like to term "macro evolution" (a scientifically meaningless term which I gather roughly means evolution of new species).
The only functionally useful definition of new species is ability to interbreed which make me wonder how you are guageing that in a species (ecoli) that predominantly reproduces asexually!
I wonder if the starting and ending strains were unable to reproduce by conjugation you would then accept them as separate species? I wonder are you at all impressed by the rather trivial changes in our lineage over the last 250,000 generations (5 million years)?
Last time I checked, having a life included having hobbies. Even if programming isn't a hobby for you [him], then you're taking pot luck if your leaving your professional development up to the vagaries of what you're exposed to at work. Personally I'd much prefer to work with people with a bit more passion and ambition for what they do - not just 9-5 jobbers.
I don't even know who Ted Dziuba is and googling for him doesn't return a WikiPedia article in the first page of results, which is as much effort as I can bother to make to find out.
I don't program because I have to - I do it because I want to. Sure, I'm a professional programmer too, but that came second, and doesn't diminish my desire to also do it on my own time. I've been doing this as a hobby since 1978, professionally since 1982.
One of my other hobbies, and primary lifetime goal, is understanding how the brain works, and the two hobbies complement each other. My hobbyist programming nowadays is directed towards implementing an artificial human-level brain (necessarily embodied) that will learn for itself like a newborn child. I've been thinking about this, on and off, for 20-25 years, and began programming on it about 5 years ago.
ARM isn't exactly struggling to find a niche you know... they sell BILLIONS of cores per year... Most smart phones (iPhone included), Windows CE devices and digital cameras are based on ARM cores. Linux based netbooks is a very obvious market for them to go after with their low power and low cost (low transistor count - it's a RISC not CISC CPU) advantages.
Saying "i've never seen it" or "i don't expect to see it" is not science. One's just an observation, and the other not even a prediction, yet alone a theory.
You may as well call "i don't expect to see margaret thatcher's bare ass" science. It's not, even if you're wearing a lab coat when you say it.
I was about to make a joke about a creationist "museum" buying the T.Rex so they could display it with Jesus riding it, but I see this whacko has beat me to it and is making sculptures in a similar vein. Try clicking on that first image and you'll get to Jesus + Dino bones!
Gotta wonder why a nutter like that is interested in excavating a T.Rex, or more to the point why anyone would let him!
They come from different places. The description of the duck bill dinosaur (hadrosaur) says it had been owned by a Japanese museum which closed, and was then bought by a private American collector who is now selling it.
There's another article here about the auction which mentions the T.Rex also currently being privately owned:
No doubt their motivation is self-centered, but that's not the point.
The bottom line is that IBM has contributed significantly to open source projects. The reason they can afford to do so is because the interests of the two are aligned - IBM has made Linux a strategic part of their business. If that were to change tomorrow they can't "discontinue" the good they've done since the contributions are GPL'd.
I'm not saying that IBM are morally better than Microsoft because of this, just pointing out that there are commercial companies whose interests are aligned with open source and have therefore been able to contribute in a way that champions of open source (e.g. the/. crowd) approve of. Just answering the question that was posed. What benefit does it do open source advocates to write code under an Microsoft "open source" licence that doesn't force or come with any reciprocity?
Want an alternate way for Microsoft to get some open source credibility, even if using a Microsoft open source licence? How about they donate some major pieces of software to the community up-front under their proposed licence, and continue to contribute on an ongoing basis? How about Microsoft open sourcing Visual C++, or C#, for example? They don't make their money in development tools, so why not? Sure they'd be giving up some Microsoft technology, but isn't that the whole point of open source - I share/contribute because YOU do too. Fundamentally, if they are not willing to share, then don't expect anyone to take them seriously when they say open source but really mean free software to benefit Microsoft.
I don't think it's the lack of a certification process that's holding back Linux-certified hardware (at least, I've never heard of hardware vendors asking for one), it's just that very few hardware vendors bother to provide Linux drivers, or are even willing to provide specifications to allow volunteers to write open source drivers.
I'm sure Ubuntu would be MORE than happy to agree to include more hardware vendor supported drivers in their distribution, if any more want to step up and provide them. I'm sure they'd also find a way to support driver development by hardware vendors that needed a hand.
If you, as a retailer, think you'd sell more hardware if it had "Works with Ubuntu" stickers on it, then why not contact the manufacturer and ask them to support it? That's the only way it's going to happen - if they believe there's a business case for it.
OK so if MS really wanted to go open source to the degree meaningful to their business what should they do so Slashdot will say something positive?
How about doing the same as IBM or Sun - actually contribute to open source on it's own (GPL) terms, rather than instead trying to harness the open source horse to the Microsoft wagon.
Of course they don't really believe in open source/free software, since they make their money selling software, not selling service, so it doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.
So that would be a resounding yes to Progress being the primary ISS supply vessel!
It's interesting to note the docked/undocked dates - each Progress basically stays docked with the ISS until it has to move to make way for the new one. They use the empty ones for garbage disposal - they stuff it with full with whatever they don't want and it all burns up together on re-entry.
Slashdot Mirror
I took math in college too. Put it down to senility.
Even the lower figure of 50K units seems quite decent for a $300 toy. It'll be interesting to see how much the new company can improve it with software updates, although I think the slow movement is a major handicap to making it seem very alive. Sony Aibo seemed to have more potential (realized at least in the form of Aibo Soccer).
According to TFA they did about $20M in sales before going belly-up. I don't know if that's wholesale or retail, but it must represent approx 500K-1M units, which doesn't seem too shabby. Presumably they could have sold a lot more if it had been more engaging and better delivered on the promises made.
It's not just visual voicemail (with automatic transciptions - read your voicemail if you want/need to be quiet) - that's just one feature.
The main feature of Google Voice, IMO, is that your Google Voice number is really YOUR number, not the number of a particular location/device. Via the web you can program what phone(s) - zero or more - ring when someone calls your GV number and you can pick up the call on any device. If you like all your calls can go direct to voicemail and you'll then pick them up either by phone or on the web.
The use of this is that you don't need to notify anyone if you go on vactation, change job, lose your cell phone, or whatever - they always call you at your GV number, and you choose where to pick the call up (maybe just at an internet cafe via the visual voicemail).
For some reason this story is tagged !supercomputer (as well as supercomputer), which seems downright churlish.
Sure NVidia's CUDA architecture is quite specialized and has some severe constaints, but OTOH so do any of these modern cluster-type supercomputers. Certain types of application map well onto these architectures and others don't. The CUDA architecture is certainly more constrained in terms of memory access per node and inter-node connectivity than say a cluster of Linux nodes.
OTOH, look at the downright mind-blowing maximum FLOP rating of this beast - 1,100,000,000,000 floating points ops per second!
Putting that in perspective I remember c.1980 when the DEC VAX was considered a very powerful department level computer given it's 1 (one) MFLOP rating - that's only one millionth of the power of this NVidia beasty!
Of course it remains to be seen what sort of FLOPS anyone can achieve in a real-world application on this, although presumably it would do pretty well on graphics rendering for which the architecture was originally designed.. be interesting to see how it compares on the types of graphics rendering that CRAY supercomputers were previously used for.
Dual boot is really a PITA unless you're hardly ever switching between OS's.
You're better off running a VM such as VirtualBox (free & recommended) in Windows and installing Ubuntu in that. You don't need to burn an Ubuntu CD image to install it - VirtualBox will let you mount the .iso file directly to a virtual CD drive. I'm sure most other VMs support this too.
They're not saying "it's identical", they're saying "architecturally, it's identical", which is to say that any differences are non-architectural (i.e. performance, power consumption, etc).
Perhaps a car analogy would help...
If I say that color-wise my Ford Pinto is identical to my Ferrari, all I'm saying is identical is the color!
Telepresenceporn
Huh?
Genetic mutations are by definition evolution.
Maybe what you meant was that it's not proof of what creationists like to term "macro evolution" (a scientifically meaningless term which I gather roughly means evolution of new species).
The only functionally useful definition of new species is ability to interbreed which make me wonder how you are guageing that in a species (ecoli) that predominantly reproduces asexually!
I wonder if the starting and ending strains were unable to reproduce by conjugation you would then accept them as separate species? I wonder are you at all impressed by the rather trivial changes in our lineage over the last 250,000 generations (5 million years)?
http://bioweb.uwlax.edu/bio203/s2008/moder_just/reproduction.htm
Last time I checked, having a life included having hobbies. Even if programming isn't a hobby for you [him], then you're taking pot luck if your leaving your professional development up to the vagaries of what you're exposed to at work. Personally I'd much prefer to work with people with a bit more passion and ambition for what they do - not just 9-5 jobbers.
I don't even know who Ted Dziuba is and googling for him doesn't return a WikiPedia article in the first page of results, which is as much effort as I can bother to make to find out.
Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Makes me wonder what the monkey, doing the hardest part of the project and being called a monkey for it, calls the person who hired him? Dumb baboon?
Empirically there does appear to be a strong association between programming and monkeys.
I don't program because I have to - I do it because I want to. Sure, I'm a professional programmer too, but that came second, and doesn't diminish my desire to also do it on my own time. I've been doing this as a hobby since 1978, professionally since 1982.
One of my other hobbies, and primary lifetime goal, is understanding how the brain works, and the two hobbies complement each other. My hobbyist programming nowadays is directed towards implementing an artificial human-level brain (necessarily embodied) that will learn for itself like a newborn child. I've been thinking about this, on and off, for 20-25 years, and began programming on it about 5 years ago.
ARM isn't exactly struggling to find a niche you know... they sell BILLIONS of cores per year... Most smart phones (iPhone included), Windows CE devices and digital cameras are based on ARM cores. Linux based netbooks is a very obvious market for them to go after with their low power and low cost (low transistor count - it's a RISC not CISC CPU) advantages.
Saying "i've never seen it" or "i don't expect to see it" is not science. One's just an observation, and the other not even a prediction, yet alone a theory.
You may as well call "i don't expect to see margaret thatcher's bare ass" science. It's not, even if you're wearing a lab coat when you say it.
Holy crap!
I was about to make a joke about a creationist "museum" buying the T.Rex so they could display it with Jesus riding it, but I see this whacko has beat me to it and is making sculptures in a similar vein. Try clicking on that first image and you'll get to Jesus + Dino bones!
Gotta wonder why a nutter like that is interested in excavating a T.Rex, or more to the point why anyone would let him!
Things like the T.Rex tend to end up in museums anyway... I expect eventually someone will donate it or leave it in their will to a museum.
Good opportunity for someone like Bill Gates to do a bit of high profile philanthropy though.
They come from different places. The description of the duck bill dinosaur (hadrosaur) says it had been owned by a Japanese museum which closed, and was then bought by a private American collector who is now selling it.
There's another article here about the auction which mentions the T.Rex also currently being privately owned:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32705922/ns/technology_and_science-science/
Sign of the recession I guess that some fat cat has to sell his T.Rex.
Wow, you can "write good" for a 3 year old.
No doubt their motivation is self-centered, but that's not the point.
The bottom line is that IBM has contributed significantly to open source projects. The reason they can afford to do so is because the interests of the two are aligned - IBM has made Linux a strategic part of their business. If that were to change tomorrow they can't "discontinue" the good they've done since the contributions are GPL'd.
I'm not saying that IBM are morally better than Microsoft because of this, just pointing out that there are commercial companies whose interests are aligned with open source and have therefore been able to contribute in a way that champions of open source (e.g. the /. crowd) approve of. Just answering the question that was posed. What benefit does it do open source advocates to write code under an Microsoft "open source" licence that doesn't force or come with any reciprocity?
Want an alternate way for Microsoft to get some open source credibility, even if using a Microsoft open source licence? How about they donate some major pieces of software to the community up-front under their proposed licence, and continue to contribute on an ongoing basis? How about Microsoft open sourcing Visual C++, or C#, for example? They don't make their money in development tools, so why not? Sure they'd be giving up some Microsoft technology, but isn't that the whole point of open source - I share/contribute because YOU do too. Fundamentally, if they are not willing to share, then don't expect anyone to take them seriously when they say open source but really mean free software to benefit Microsoft.
I don't think it's the lack of a certification process that's holding back Linux-certified hardware (at least, I've never heard of hardware vendors asking for one), it's just that very few hardware vendors bother to provide Linux drivers, or are even willing to provide specifications to allow volunteers to write open source drivers.
I'm sure Ubuntu would be MORE than happy to agree to include more hardware vendor supported drivers in their distribution, if any more want to step up and provide them. I'm sure they'd also find a way to support driver development by hardware vendors that needed a hand.
If you, as a retailer, think you'd sell more hardware if it had "Works with Ubuntu" stickers on it, then why not contact the manufacturer and ask them to support it? That's the only way it's going to happen - if they believe there's a business case for it.
OK so if MS really wanted to go open source to the degree meaningful to their business what should they do so Slashdot will say something positive?
How about doing the same as IBM or Sun - actually contribute to open source on it's own (GPL) terms, rather than instead trying to harness the open source horse to the Microsoft wagon.
Of course they don't really believe in open source/free software, since they make their money selling software, not selling service, so it doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.
Thanks - interesting.
So that would be a resounding yes to Progress being the primary ISS supply vessel!
It's interesting to note the docked/undocked dates - each Progress basically stays docked with the ISS until it has to move to make way for the new one. They use the empty ones for garbage disposal - they stuff it with full with whatever they don't want and it all burns up together on re-entry.
I thought it was the unmanned Russian Progress spacecraft that has mostly been supplying the ISS:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/progress.html
I guess anyone carrying a sandwich could be accused of carrying a potential murder weapon since you could suffocate someone with one.
Nuts and bolts = nuclear weapon technology
Mouldy cucumber = biowarfare device
It seems the garage got sloppy in not charging him with DMCA violation since the recorder could be used for that too.