So? Function call sequences have to be executed on RISC CPUs as well. On the X86, most of those instructions are encoded in a single byte each, which is a cache-friendly compact representation. Under the hood, that whole sequence is recast into an optimal representation for the particular chip and usually executes in about two clock cycles. Pre-decoded instructions are usually cached in some form, so the x86-to-RISC translation is not incurred all that often anyway.
The bottom line is: has any other architecture enabled apps run significantly faster over multiple CPU generations at comparable costs? Nope. As other architecture fads have come and gone, but the X86 just absorbs the best ideas from each and keeps marching along.
Applicants for a patent are always required to disclose any prior art of which they are aware....
There are fairly heavy penalties for failing to disclose prior art, btw.
BFD. They don't have to go searching for prior art either. Since each individual is only aware of a tiny minority of everything that happens in this world, any given applicant's ignorance of prior art proves exactly nothing about whether the proposed patent covers things that have previously been invented elsewhere.
None of our current military nuclear weapons use fission anymore, they all use fusion.
Wrong. Most "fusion" weapons in fact get the majority of their energy from fission.
For fusion to work, you need a heavy casing to channel the X-rays that compress the fusion fuel. If you happen to make the casing out of uranium 238 instead of lead, you get a 2-3X boost in power because the fast neutrons from the fusion reaction can split unenriched uranium without needing a chain reaction, which yields significant extra energy. Since this fission-based power boost comes for "free" simply for using dirt cheap unenriched uranium instead of another metal for the casing, most weapons uses it.
The problem is that people paranoid about nuclear proliferation
To paraphrase the old saying: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that dozens of countries around the globe running large nuclear fuel reprocessing programs wouldn't a major proliferation risk.
If NASA can receive data from a ~10 watt transmitter at a distance of 10 billion miles, I'm sure that it's possible for someone to read the leakage from any signals inside the building from a distance of 1 block, no matter how much "shielding" is slapped onto the walls.
Yes there's always been crap. But it wasn't always nearly *exclusively* crap.
I agree there's lots of good stuff that's "hard to find". That's the whole problem that the big record companies are facing. Little if any of the good stuff is mass marketed any more. They've relegated all of that to niche players. It's as if the banana growers had said: "We're only going to ship bruised bananas to supermarkets from now on. If you want good bananas, you'll have to go search for them on 2-bit websites and obscure stores near college campuses." If that happened, it would be no surprise if banana revenue went through the floor.
I'm well aware that new music styles incorporate elements from older ones. That's not what's currently happening. What we have on the popular charts is bad rehashes of exactly the same styles and ideas that have come before without new innovations. (I wouldn't even mind if they were good rehashes.)
Through all of those decades, as I got older and older, I liked every one of those. I've got CDs or LPs of every one of those bands except Run DMC.
Now I'm only slightly older, and there is rarely anything on the mainstream music charts that is anywhere as good as any of those. I haven't changed that much in the last few years. I know what's good and what's crap. I can tell what bands are real and what bands have been prefabricated by the record companies based on focus groups.
If there were some new musical style on the pop charts that I just "didn't get", maybe you'd have a point. However, that's not the case. Most everything I see is a poor derivative of various genres that were already done better the first time around.
In fact, one of the main problems is probably that the big record companies are too conservative and stick with the same tired formulas rather than finding new music directions that alienate old people for the right reasons. As it stands, what they're doing is alienating everyone because it's just crap. It's no wonder CD sales are plummeting.
Since you're browsing slashdot when instead you could be working on harnessing fusion power, it would seem that you're just as guilty of having skewed priorities as these astrophysicists.
The CD wouldn't play with an off-the-shelf CD player. That doesn't mean that a special "archaeological" CD player can't be built that would perform extensive microscopic image analysis of the disk surface in order to read the data in the face of extensive corruption.
Some analog technologies, like old color films, have also degraded and need image enhancement to recover the original content.
I'm not sure that just a converter box will be enough for a lot of people. In many cases, they'll have to get a significantly improved antenna for all of the channels to be watchable.
I got a digital receiver box about a year ago to get the extra subchannels and HD shows in my area. I don't watch it enough to bother with an outdoor antenna or expensive indoor antenna, so I use the same rabbit ears that I used for analog TV when the cable screws up. It usually works, but sometimes, especially in wet weather, the signal drops out. With digital TV, that means a blank screen and no sound. (I keep wondering WTF the rocket scientists who designed this system didn't allocate 8KHz of the signal to an *analog* telephone-quality backup audio track so that at least you don't miss out on the story line when dropouts happen.)
Meanwhile, down in my basement I have a 30-year old analog TV with even crappier rabbit ears 5 feet below ground that is acceptably watchable, even if it's a bit snowy. Analog TV just has a lot more tolerance for poor signal conditions.
IMO, anybody in a marginal signal area that uses broadcast signals for more than casual viewing is going to need a top-notch antenna. My guess is that in a lot of cases, that upgrade will cost much more than the digital receiver box.
As part of the learning process, when we experience unpleasant events, we gain the wisdom to avoid them in the future. The lesson here is: DST has changed many times in the past, and it will certainly change again in the future. Failure to anticipate this causes a lot of extra work for people. Training always has a cost, and we have just seen the cost of this lesson.
Not at all. The last change in the USA was 20 years ago.
In the US, it was changed federally in 1918, 1920, 1942, 1945, 1966, 1974, 1975, 1985, 1986 and 2007. That averages out to about once per decade. Up until 1966, many individual states also fiddled with the times. Even today, states are allowed to opt in and out of DST altogether, and Indiana just recently changed its rules.
This change in DST was definitely worth it, if only for the benefit of forcing embedded systems designers to remember to not hard-code DST dates into their code. Historically, these dates have been changed about once per decade in the US alone. Assuming that they'll never change again is plain stupid. This shift will help train the current generation of developers to just not do that.
Wouldn't nearly all vaporize due to the extremely low pressure?
Eventually, but the ice would have to sublimate, which is a much slower process than liquid evaporation.
Obviously it depends on the liquid, but lets say water that was lukewarm before it leaked.
The latent heat energy of evaporation, which is what would drive the process, is much greater than the heat energy of temperature differences in the liquid. The initial temperature wouldn't matter that much.
The fluid promptly freezes because, as we all know, outerspace is really, really cold.
Actually, fluid in space freezes because much of it quickly evaporates when it hits a vacuum, which chills the remaining droplets below the freezing point. This is similar to the way they make dry ice by letting compressed CO2 flow out of a nozzle.
Even without DST, timezone boundaries are still arbitrary political definitions that occasionally get changed. No matter what, it's not a good idea to hard-code timezone information. DST and changes to it are a good thing because they force developers to remember not to hard code time info, thus avoiding much larger problems if timezone changes were very infrequent and everything drifted into being hard coded. This is like a booster shot for a vaccine; it may hurt a little, but in the end it's good for you.
The top priority needs to be setting up these systems inside the White House and the Pentagon. Then the next time they blunder into a quagmire like this, we can scan the databases and quickly find out exactly who needs to be held accountable. Then the problem can be rectified: "It looks like we're going to have to dock your paychecks for a total of $5.0e11."
It's better than paying $29.95 for a cable worth $5 at a big box store. Cables seem to be right behind extended warranties and printer ink in the retail cash cow category.
Slashdot Mirror
The bottom line is: has any other architecture enabled apps run significantly faster over multiple CPU generations at comparable costs? Nope. As other architecture fads have come and gone, but the X86 just absorbs the best ideas from each and keeps marching along.
BFD. They don't have to go searching for prior art either. Since each individual is only aware of a tiny minority of everything that happens in this world, any given applicant's ignorance of prior art proves exactly nothing about whether the proposed patent covers things that have previously been invented elsewhere.
Wrong. Most "fusion" weapons in fact get the majority of their energy from fission.
For fusion to work, you need a heavy casing to channel the X-rays that compress the fusion fuel. If you happen to make the casing out of uranium 238 instead of lead, you get a 2-3X boost in power because the fast neutrons from the fusion reaction can split unenriched uranium without needing a chain reaction, which yields significant extra energy. Since this fission-based power boost comes for "free" simply for using dirt cheap unenriched uranium instead of another metal for the casing, most weapons uses it.
To paraphrase the old saying: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that dozens of countries around the globe running large nuclear fuel reprocessing programs wouldn't a major proliferation risk.
If NASA can receive data from a ~10 watt transmitter at a distance of 10 billion miles, I'm sure that it's possible for someone to read the leakage from any signals inside the building from a distance of 1 block, no matter how much "shielding" is slapped onto the walls.
I agree there's lots of good stuff that's "hard to find". That's the whole problem that the big record companies are facing. Little if any of the good stuff is mass marketed any more. They've relegated all of that to niche players. It's as if the banana growers had said: "We're only going to ship bruised bananas to supermarkets from now on. If you want good bananas, you'll have to go search for them on 2-bit websites and obscure stores near college campuses." If that happened, it would be no surprise if banana revenue went through the floor.
I'm well aware that new music styles incorporate elements from older ones. That's not what's currently happening. What we have on the popular charts is bad rehashes of exactly the same styles and ideas that have come before without new innovations. (I wouldn't even mind if they were good rehashes.)
Now I'm only slightly older, and there is rarely anything on the mainstream music charts that is anywhere as good as any of those. I haven't changed that much in the last few years. I know what's good and what's crap. I can tell what bands are real and what bands have been prefabricated by the record companies based on focus groups.
If there were some new musical style on the pop charts that I just "didn't get", maybe you'd have a point. However, that's not the case. Most everything I see is a poor derivative of various genres that were already done better the first time around.
In fact, one of the main problems is probably that the big record companies are too conservative and stick with the same tired formulas rather than finding new music directions that alienate old people for the right reasons. As it stands, what they're doing is alienating everyone because it's just crap. It's no wonder CD sales are plummeting.
Since you're browsing slashdot when instead you could be working on harnessing fusion power, it would seem that you're just as guilty of having skewed priorities as these astrophysicists.
Some analog technologies, like old color films, have also degraded and need image enhancement to recover the original content.
1. The commonly used options almost always have short versions.
2. Long options are still better than some stuck-in-the-1970s old-school Unix utilities which annoyingly lack many useful options altogether.
3. The option to use long options is really great for writing scripts where readability is much more important than brevity.
It looks like there is an opportunity here to leverage synergy with a cross-licensing agreement.
I got a digital receiver box about a year ago to get the extra subchannels and HD shows in my area. I don't watch it enough to bother with an outdoor antenna or expensive indoor antenna, so I use the same rabbit ears that I used for analog TV when the cable screws up. It usually works, but sometimes, especially in wet weather, the signal drops out. With digital TV, that means a blank screen and no sound. (I keep wondering WTF the rocket scientists who designed this system didn't allocate 8KHz of the signal to an *analog* telephone-quality backup audio track so that at least you don't miss out on the story line when dropouts happen.)
Meanwhile, down in my basement I have a 30-year old analog TV with even crappier rabbit ears 5 feet below ground that is acceptably watchable, even if it's a bit snowy. Analog TV just has a lot more tolerance for poor signal conditions.
IMO, anybody in a marginal signal area that uses broadcast signals for more than casual viewing is going to need a top-notch antenna. My guess is that in a lot of cases, that upgrade will cost much more than the digital receiver box.
As part of the learning process, when we experience unpleasant events, we gain the wisdom to avoid them in the future. The lesson here is: DST has changed many times in the past, and it will certainly change again in the future. Failure to anticipate this causes a lot of extra work for people. Training always has a cost, and we have just seen the cost of this lesson.
In the US, it was changed federally in 1918, 1920, 1942, 1945, 1966, 1974, 1975, 1985, 1986 and 2007. That averages out to about once per decade. Up until 1966, many individual states also fiddled with the times. Even today, states are allowed to opt in and out of DST altogether, and Indiana just recently changed its rules.
This change in DST was definitely worth it, if only for the benefit of forcing embedded systems designers to remember to not hard-code DST dates into their code. Historically, these dates have been changed about once per decade in the US alone. Assuming that they'll never change again is plain stupid. This shift will help train the current generation of developers to just not do that.
I especially like contractual gems such as:
char *gets(char *s);
...antimatter beings have just discovered that cancer may be treatable with particles of ordinary matter.
It is a kind of ironic that your brief rant on poor language usage contains 9 obvious grammatical mistakes.
Eventually, but the ice would have to sublimate, which is a much slower process than liquid evaporation.
The latent heat energy of evaporation, which is what would drive the process, is much greater than the heat energy of temperature differences in the liquid. The initial temperature wouldn't matter that much.
Actually, fluid in space freezes because much of it quickly evaporates when it hits a vacuum, which chills the remaining droplets below the freezing point. This is similar to the way they make dry ice by letting compressed CO2 flow out of a nozzle.
Even without DST, timezone boundaries are still arbitrary political definitions that occasionally get changed. No matter what, it's not a good idea to hard-code timezone information. DST and changes to it are a good thing because they force developers to remember not to hard code time info, thus avoiding much larger problems if timezone changes were very infrequent and everything drifted into being hard coded. This is like a booster shot for a vaccine; it may hurt a little, but in the end it's good for you.
The top priority needs to be setting up these systems inside the White House and the Pentagon. Then the next time they blunder into a quagmire like this, we can scan the databases and quickly find out exactly who needs to be held accountable. Then the problem can be rectified: "It looks like we're going to have to dock your paychecks for a total of $5.0e11."
Specialized hardware units rack up impressive benchmark numbers on specific tasks relative to general-purpose CPUs. News at 11.
It's better than paying $29.95 for a cable worth $5 at a big box store. Cables seem to be right behind extended warranties and printer ink in the retail cash cow category.