In related news, the next 50 years will see such an explosion in human population that we will be standing shoulder to shoulder stacked five high.
In my introductory calculus class, the professor gave us this problem: Assuming the human population continues to grow at its current exponential rate (and ignoring relativistic effects), how many years will it be until the surface of the expanding sphere of human bodies reaches the speed of light?
Heak, it may be *mildly* "poisioness", but then, isn't everything poision to you?
IIRC, nicotine is among some of the most poisonous substances known. It is used as the active ingredient in some insecticides. The only reason cigarettes don't kill you immediately is that they contain it in very minute amounts.
Can I build fast, non-scripted, closed source apps for KDE like I can for GNOME? Or do I still have to pay the 4 digit price tag for a commerical QT DEV license?
Can I use the fast, non-scripted close source apps that you build like I can use freeware? Or do I still have to pay some kind of price tag for an end user license?
Not the one's I've seen. As far as I recall, they were standard unmarked Hollerith cards.
That's what makes the punched card system appealing to the administrators. They don't have to print millions of ballots; they only have to print a few thousand templates (1 for each voting machine).
It was like a preview of the World Wide Web, 25 years ahead of the real thing. (It also had email, newsgroup and chat functionality as well). The high-res orange plasma terminals looked cool too, especially the way they drew graphics in a vector-like fashion, like someone drawing a blueprint at high speed. They weren't very bright, so the terminal rooms had to be kept very dark. The low light and orange glow enhanced the atmosphere.
The entry-level physics course had the option of using PLATO for all of the homework. The system could show animated demonstrations of the mechanics problems you had to solve.
It was amazing that they usually got fairly responsive interactive performance even when hundreds of users shared a single mainframe that probably had less power than a 386.
Some of the later plasma terminals had their own microprocessors and could be set to run programs locally. It was good to use those terminals because some of the best games used the local mode. I wonder if downloading these programs on demand to the terminals could be considered a "plug-in".
Re:Just stick with what we've got....
on
CNN Reports on Diebold
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
On the other hand, the voter also has a responsibility to make sure that the card is punched to the best of their ability.
I've use punch card voting systems, and the problem with them is that you get almost no feedback after you've punched the card. The card itself is hidden under a template full of little holes (which in the case of a butterfly ballot, don't quite line up with the names off to the sides), and it's hard to see down into those holes to tell if you actually punched the hole. There isn't much mechanical feedback, either. Once you pull the card out of the template, it looks like just a bunch of random holes.
I've been interacting with machines a long time; I used punched cards back when they were considered to be a software development environment. If I don't feel comfortable that I didn't make an error on a punched card ballot, I don't see how someone in the general public is supposed to.
Lately, the ballots I've used are the ones where each name is next to two arrows that point to each other. You use your pencil to draw a line on the paper to connect the arrows. It seems to me that this system is just about perfect, and it's machine readable. I don't understand why anybody thinks we need anything more complex than that.
Care to explain how a 2000 year old religion such as christianity could have 'just swiped' observances belonging to a pseudo religion like paganism with roots in the 19th century?
Actualy, they swiped the Samhain holiday from the Celts who were around since 800 B.C. From the
entry at howstuffworks.com:
Originally, Christians observed All Saints' Day on May 13. But in the eighth century, Pope Gregory III moved it to November 1. Officially, the Church chose this new date to mark the papal dedication of a church honoring the saints. But many historians believe the Church really moved the observance to correspond with Samhain and other pagan fall festivals.
I think it's funny that people have no problem with extremely liberal news, but when you have something that is right of center it is automatically terrible.
You know, that's the first time I've ever heard anybody suggest that there might be a problem with liberal news. That is a mystery: why has nobody on this planet ever criticized the news for being too liberal? You would think that at least one conservative out there would speak up about this issue.
Did you object to the complexity of API or the functionality?
I objected to the complexity because when all was said and done, it provided almost no functionality over what could have been achieved with the standard POSIX filesystem APIs like "open(path, flags)" and "write(fd, data, len)". The APIs are riddled with extra parameters and obscure data types that almost nobody ever uses, but which need to be supplied to the call anyway. Since they use special registry-only calls with unique signatures, you can't reuse any standard filesystem utility code or idioms that have been around for decades.
The API was basically awkward and clumsy. Using it felt like slogging through waist-deep mud.
Not only should people send a C&D letter, but can't they also take scox to at least small court?
Small claims court? If each and every music track put on a publicly accessible share is worth tens of thousands of dollars in fines, think of how much you could get from somebody who is illegally distributing a complete server operating system. With the number of source files involved, you could stand to make $Millions!
Read down the article for details on how they can now do things like mount the registry as a drive and walk it like a filesystem. Yegads!
...
I think people don't give MS enough credit for where they stand even today, frankly.
Way ahead of them there. Five years ago when I got sick of the insanely overengineered registry API, I wrote my own C++ wrapper that did essentially the same thing. I'm sure thousands of others have done this as well. Glad to see that they're catching up with the rest of us.
The thing that I can't fathom is WTF didn't they make the registry look like a file system in the first place? Now when they finally get around to doing it, people think that it's some kind of rocket science. It only seems high tech because the original API was so unuseable.
The real problem in Vietnam (and most other countries run by communist, oligarchical governments) is that IP laws are treated as optional...something that you vaugely enforce in order to appease trade policy negotiators from 1st world countries. Switching to "Open Source" won't fix that problem.
Why should they put any more effort than this? Unless and until they become net exporters of IP, there is no reason for them to do more than the absolute minimum enforcement necessary: just enough so that their trading partners don't retaliate by banning their physical goods exports. All of the piracy that they get away with becomes a net positive on their economy's balance sheet. It's simple economics, regardless of the form of government, and communist governments aren't the only ones who do this.
Well, you're wrong. The speed-of-light limitation only applies to objects embedded within space. It doesn't apply to space itself.
I can only swim about 3 miles per hour. If you put the swimming pool on the back of a truck, I could still only swim at 3 mph within the water, but that doesn't mean that there would be a 3 mph limit on the truck moving the pool itself.
If you had READ what he said you would have noticed he was comparing cars, not trucks/suvs.
Hmmm... since the original post wasn't exactly grammatically correct, I suppose you could parse it to mean that SUVs particularly suck compared to both large and small cars. However, to me it seems more likely that he's bundling all three together in the 'similar' category.
Now, people are realizing that the gas mileage between a compact and a full sized car is negligible (it's also negligible compared to an SUV)
The 2.5X difference in MPG between a large SUV and a compact car is negligible? If they were to propose raising your taxes by 150%, would you consider that to be negligible as well?
I'm all for the occasional YRO, thrown in with games, science, hardware, etc. but > 30% of the front page for one topic? *sigh*
Maybe it's because the personal computing industry is maturing. There just aren't as many significant new non-rehash developments coming out with games, hardware, etc. as there were in the past.
Just like in the old West, once the exploring and prospecting wound down, the focus shifted to building barbed wire fences around the patches of land that people had laid stake to. The YRO articles usually cover similar efforts of various parties to claim and cordon off various sections of the technology industry.
A scene from the upcoming blockbuster movie "Citizen Gates":
Thatcher: I happened to see your legal settlement
statement yesterday, Bill. Could
I not suggest to you that it is
unwise for you to continue this
monopolistic enterprise -
(sneeringly)
this Microsoft - that is costing you
two hundred million dollars a year?
Gates: You're right. We did forfeit 200 million
dollars this year.
We expect to pay 200 million next
year, too. You know, Mr. Thatcher -
(starts tapping quietly)
at the rate of two hundred million a year -
we'll have to close this place in
200 years.
This is kind of like Sun's JAVA OS, where everything is managed by the JVM, except.NET is fast, 95% as fast as native, and supports far more languages.
That tells us very little, since "native" performance can vary by 10X or more depending on how it's written. An implementation in C++ that uses lots of automatic object construction and destruction with generic containers and algorithms can be rather slow, maybe even slower than a good Java implementation. An implementation in C that makes extensive use of high-level libraries like glib/gobject/etc. can also be a little sluggish.
However, most OSes aren't written like that; they're written using carefully tuned hand crafted data structures and algorithms. These tend to avoid doing any redundant allocating, copying, initializing, etc. This is one reason that it can take hundreds of developers decade or more to produce only about 1 megabyte of kernel image.
I really have to doubt that an OS written completely in a VM is going to get anywhere near 95% of the performance of one of the popular conventional OSes. I also doubt that it's even possible to write a certain portion of the OS code in a VM since an OS often has to muck with page tables and goof around with obscure CPU control bits. During these times, the general-purpose memory management routines of a VM could often be unusable.
"Jealousy has driven more mistakes by my competitors than anything else," Gates said. "When people focus not on the next breakthrough, but on cutting off Microsoft, it's actually been quite a windfall for us."
People have to focus on cutting off Microsoft
because otherwise Microsoft will assimilate the breakthroughs, bundle it with their existing products and eliminate those people from the marketplace. Gates just perceives this as jealousy from his perspective. He is right, though, that the energy his would-be competitors must expend on the issue makes them even less likely to survive.
Moron, you should be taking that 100 mile round trip, not the net change in position. We're not talking about kinetic energy, we're talking about work.
Dufus, we're talking about motion, not work. In a frictionless environment, you could make the round trip with an arbitrarily small amount of work. All of the work that a car does goes only to overcome friction and provide kinetic energy that will be wasted by the brakes. Essentially all of the energy used by a car becomes waste heat. As I said, a car's efficiency is zero.
Not even that. Out of that energy, a good deal turns into losses elsewhere, like transmission and gearbox (stuff you can do without with for instance electric motors). I believe the 'real' number is closer to 15%.
Actually when you account for all losses, a car is 0% efficient. Start with your car in your garage; its kinetic energy is zero. Now drive on a 100 mile round trip, using 4 gallons of gas.
When you get back, put your car back in the garage; its kinetic energy is zero again. You have just used up several hundred megajoules of energy, and you have nothing to show for it.
When there are problems, it's easy to sue a company and put the blame on them.
That's right. Now if terrorists crack the launch codes and launch our missiles against our own cities, we'll be able to sue Certicom to recoup our losses.
Slashdot Mirror
In my introductory calculus class, the professor gave us this problem: Assuming the human population continues to grow at its current exponential rate (and ignoring relativistic effects), how many years will it be until the surface of the expanding sphere of human bodies reaches the speed of light?
IIRC, the answer was only a few thousand years.
Ok, but weren't you originally complaining about Trolltech's attempts to feed their families?
IIRC, nicotine is among some of the most poisonous substances known. It is used as the active ingredient in some insecticides. The only reason cigarettes don't kill you immediately is that they contain it in very minute amounts.
Can I use the fast, non-scripted close source apps that you build like I can use freeware? Or do I still have to pay some kind of price tag for an end user license?
Not the one's I've seen. As far as I recall, they were standard unmarked Hollerith cards.
That's what makes the punched card system appealing to the administrators. They don't have to print millions of ballots; they only have to print a few thousand templates (1 for each voting machine).
The entry-level physics course had the option of using PLATO for all of the homework. The system could show animated demonstrations of the mechanics problems you had to solve.
It was amazing that they usually got fairly responsive interactive performance even when hundreds of users shared a single mainframe that probably had less power than a 386.
Some of the later plasma terminals had their own microprocessors and could be set to run programs locally. It was good to use those terminals because some of the best games used the local mode. I wonder if downloading these programs on demand to the terminals could be considered a "plug-in".
I've use punch card voting systems, and the problem with them is that you get almost no feedback after you've punched the card. The card itself is hidden under a template full of little holes (which in the case of a butterfly ballot, don't quite line up with the names off to the sides), and it's hard to see down into those holes to tell if you actually punched the hole. There isn't much mechanical feedback, either. Once you pull the card out of the template, it looks like just a bunch of random holes.
I've been interacting with machines a long time; I used punched cards back when they were considered to be a software development environment. If I don't feel comfortable that I didn't make an error on a punched card ballot, I don't see how someone in the general public is supposed to.
Lately, the ballots I've used are the ones where each name is next to two arrows that point to each other. You use your pencil to draw a line on the paper to connect the arrows. It seems to me that this system is just about perfect, and it's machine readable. I don't understand why anybody thinks we need anything more complex than that.
Actualy, they swiped the Samhain holiday from the Celts who were around since 800 B.C. From the entry at howstuffworks.com:
That's how.
You know, that's the first time I've ever heard anybody suggest that there might be a problem with liberal news. That is a mystery: why has nobody on this planet ever criticized the news for being too liberal? You would think that at least one conservative out there would speak up about this issue.
I objected to the complexity because when all was said and done, it provided almost no functionality over what could have been achieved with the standard POSIX filesystem APIs like "open(path, flags)" and "write(fd, data, len)". The APIs are riddled with extra parameters and obscure data types that almost nobody ever uses, but which need to be supplied to the call anyway. Since they use special registry-only calls with unique signatures, you can't reuse any standard filesystem utility code or idioms that have been around for decades.
The API was basically awkward and clumsy. Using it felt like slogging through waist-deep mud.
Small claims court? If each and every music track put on a publicly accessible share is worth tens of thousands of dollars in fines, think of how much you could get from somebody who is illegally distributing a complete server operating system. With the number of source files involved, you could stand to make $Millions!
...
I think people don't give MS enough credit for where they stand even today, frankly.
Way ahead of them there. Five years ago when I got sick of the insanely overengineered registry API, I wrote my own C++ wrapper that did essentially the same thing. I'm sure thousands of others have done this as well. Glad to see that they're catching up with the rest of us.
The thing that I can't fathom is WTF didn't they make the registry look like a file system in the first place? Now when they finally get around to doing it, people think that it's some kind of rocket science. It only seems high tech because the original API was so unuseable.
Why should they put any more effort than this? Unless and until they become net exporters of IP, there is no reason for them to do more than the absolute minimum enforcement necessary: just enough so that their trading partners don't retaliate by banning their physical goods exports. All of the piracy that they get away with becomes a net positive on their economy's balance sheet. It's simple economics, regardless of the form of government, and communist governments aren't the only ones who do this.
I can only swim about 3 miles per hour. If you put the swimming pool on the back of a truck, I could still only swim at 3 mph within the water, but that doesn't mean that there would be a 3 mph limit on the truck moving the pool itself.
Hmmm... since the original post wasn't exactly grammatically correct, I suppose you could parse it to mean that SUVs particularly suck compared to both large and small cars. However, to me it seems more likely that he's bundling all three together in the 'similar' category.
The 2.5X difference in MPG between a large SUV and a compact car is negligible? If they were to propose raising your taxes by 150%, would you consider that to be negligible as well?
Maybe it's because the personal computing industry is maturing. There just aren't as many significant new non-rehash developments coming out with games, hardware, etc. as there were in the past.
Just like in the old West, once the exploring and prospecting wound down, the focus shifted to building barbed wire fences around the patches of land that people had laid stake to. The YRO articles usually cover similar efforts of various parties to claim and cordon off various sections of the technology industry.
Thatcher: I happened to see your legal settlement statement yesterday, Bill. Could I not suggest to you that it is unwise for you to continue this monopolistic enterprise - (sneeringly) this Microsoft - that is costing you two hundred million dollars a year?
Gates: You're right. We did forfeit 200 million dollars this year.
We expect to pay 200 million next year, too. You know, Mr. Thatcher - (starts tapping quietly) at the rate of two hundred million a year - we'll have to close this place in 200 years.
What warranty?
That tells us very little, since "native" performance can vary by 10X or more depending on how it's written. An implementation in C++ that uses lots of automatic object construction and destruction with generic containers and algorithms can be rather slow, maybe even slower than a good Java implementation. An implementation in C that makes extensive use of high-level libraries like glib/gobject/etc. can also be a little sluggish.
However, most OSes aren't written like that; they're written using carefully tuned hand crafted data structures and algorithms. These tend to avoid doing any redundant allocating, copying, initializing, etc. This is one reason that it can take hundreds of developers decade or more to produce only about 1 megabyte of kernel image.
I really have to doubt that an OS written completely in a VM is going to get anywhere near 95% of the performance of one of the popular conventional OSes. I also doubt that it's even possible to write a certain portion of the OS code in a VM since an OS often has to muck with page tables and goof around with obscure CPU control bits. During these times, the general-purpose memory management routines of a VM could often be unusable.
People have to focus on cutting off Microsoft because otherwise Microsoft will assimilate the breakthroughs, bundle it with their existing products and eliminate those people from the marketplace. Gates just perceives this as jealousy from his perspective. He is right, though, that the energy his would-be competitors must expend on the issue makes them even less likely to survive.
Dufus, we're talking about motion, not work. In a frictionless environment, you could make the round trip with an arbitrarily small amount of work. All of the work that a car does goes only to overcome friction and provide kinetic energy that will be wasted by the brakes. Essentially all of the energy used by a car becomes waste heat. As I said, a car's efficiency is zero.
Actually when you account for all losses, a car is 0% efficient. Start with your car in your garage; its kinetic energy is zero. Now drive on a 100 mile round trip, using 4 gallons of gas.
When you get back, put your car back in the garage; its kinetic energy is zero again. You have just used up several hundred megajoules of energy, and you have nothing to show for it.
That's right. Now if terrorists crack the launch codes and launch our missiles against our own cities, we'll be able to sue Certicom to recoup our losses.
Because they are bloated, overly complicated, overpriced kludge boxes. People in the know stick with the clean, elegant VIC-20.