They just need to shed their glamorous images and
spend more carefully. By my math, if they choose
cost-effective food such as a McDonald's Value
Meal for $2.79, it would only take 1213 dedicated fans
downloading their song to pay for lunch.
Even better, the fans have to download broken formats
that will be unplayable in a few years, so the
artists can have another Big Mac later on, courtesy
of the same 1213 fans!
Speaking of badass mainframe processors, I was an intern at IBM in the mid 80's. The top-of-the-line mainframes used a central processor comprised of about 100 custom ECL chips mounted on a 4-inch-square 100-layer ceramic substrate.
The whole thing was cased in a shiny metal module. Each chip had its own sping-loaded heat slug that transferred heat to the cooling liquid sent through the module's plumbing. (100 ECL chips == major kilowattage)
They told me each CPU cost about $50,000. On a factory tour, I saw an entire pallette of these sitting on the floor, kind of like gold at Fort Knox.
These things may not perform like today's chips, but they gave meaning to the term "Big Iron"
Back in the early 1900's, New Englands forest cover was at about 25% and its probably close to 70% or more now...
That's because prior to the early 1900's the folks in New England cut down nearly every tree in the region. They then realized that that was a mistake and have been working to rectify the situation.
The only problem is, New England is something like 1/1000th of the earth's total area. Not a very good base to extrapolate from.
As for wider counts of the number of trees, Christmas tree farms don't count as valid forests, either.
Why must the US keep spending money on bigger guns?
Because 5000 years of human history has shown that the side with the better weapons usually wins. Everybody wants to be a winner. That's why whole world is spending money on bigger guns.
If I was born on one of these ships, I'd dedicate my whole life to inventing a warp drive so I could get the hell out of that tin can.
Most likely though, after sixty years of fruitless effort I would throw in the towel. I would spend the remainder of my time drunk in my cabin: a bitter, broken lonely man, shunned by my shipmates.
Upon my death, friendless, my body would be unceremoniously dumped into the biomass recycler.
Current project status
on
FreeDOS
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
For those too lazy to read the article, here's a summary of the current project status:
After over a decade of work, the project has recreated all of the userland DOS applications including COMMAND.COM, XCOPY.EXE, FDISK.EXE, and many more. The powerful.BAT shell language has been cloned. Even enterprise-level development environments such as QBASIC are complete.
However, the goal of creating a new, next-generation DOS kernel remains unfulfilled. Perhaps the bar was set too high. As of now, the system runs on an implementation of IO.SYS written by some Scandinavian college kid.
They say this because of the huge expense needed to provide 512MB or more of ultra fast memory. But what if they added yet another level of "cache"?
Put in 128MB or more of super-fast RAM (faster than today's RDRAM or DDRAM, maybe using an exotic bus) backed by gigs of cheap, easy-to-make memory (PC266 DDRAM or slower). The cheap ram is still orders of magnitude faster than a disk drive. Manage them with hardware that does page swapping similar to virtual memory.
You could get good system performance and lower overall cost.
...Considering that most major theater chains are currently in or on the verge of bankrupcy. It's not the time to be out buying super-expensive new projectors, especially when they just got done on a huge overbuilding spree.
Anyway, this situation will be a money-making bonanza for Lucas. They can re-release the film to theaters after a few years, this time in "full digital glory" and with 3 more minutes of previously cut scenes. All of the usual geeks will show up and shell their money out once again (OTOH, if it sucks as much as episode 1, maybe not).
/i>No I believe that mathematical constructs on how to transmit an image
in whatever style faxes do it was invented in 1820. Obviously the fax
machine itself wasn't possible in 1820.
Actually, they invented the fax machine almost
immediately after the telegraph. You wrote the original
on some kind of conducting paper and wrapped it on a xmit drum.
A needle on the sending machine sent the signal over the
telegraph wire to a receiving drum with a pen.
Obviously, though, they didn't use TIFF compression.
I just finished the book on Babbage written by the curator
of the London Science Museum computer collection.
He said that they were careful to not use more
precision than the parts that Babbage actually
fabricated at the time. They used the automatic
manufacturing process to save money and time;
they couldn't afford to sink as many funds into
their project as Babbage did:).
Babbage did have an actual working section of the
Difference Engine, and enough parts were made
to almost finish it. After a delay caused by his
conflicts with his parts maker, he got distracted
by his new ideas for the Analytical Engine, and
never bothered to finish the original. So he was not
only one of the first to do computer design, he was also one
of the first examples of a very common person today: a brilliant but stubborn and impossible-to-manage
developer who doesn't keep focused on deliverables. He was ahead of his time in many ways!
I would be VERY annoyed if these same companies manage to get a tax added to the rice of every HD/writable CD/etc, and believe me, they are trying, as they know this is free money for them!
For a tax like this to be really fair, they'd have to allocate a proportional share of money for the hard working, underpaid pr0n stars who's artistry surely fill up a large fraction of these disks.
Somehow, though, I don't see something like a Ron Jeremy Digital Media Performance Compensation Act making it out of a congressional committe.
It seems to me that most coputational tasks are
more I/O bound than processor bound anyway. This
scheme would just make the problem worse by moving
the computations farther away from the ultimate
source and destination of the data being processed.
Processors faster than 2GHz are dirt cheap today.
High-bandwidth connections aren't
cheap, and connections to home users are 3 orders of
magnitude slower than an internal disk drive channel.
This kind of thing only seems to make sense for the
most geek-oriented scientific types of calculations, and of those
only the jobs that are trivially parallelized, like SETI. I
don't see everyone changing their OS to support it.
Not to be outdone by the electric utilities, the Gas Industry Alliance today announced
plans to provide Internet connectivity via their customers' existing gas lines. Researchers
discovered that gas lines function as effective acoustic wave guides. The gas utilities plan
to provide homeowners with acoustically coupled modems that will transmit sound waves
through their gas connections to the central station. An advanced acoustic multiplexing modem
at the central station will sort out the incoming bitstreams and route
the packets onto the Internet.
Field tests have demonstrated bit rates in excess of 300 Baud, and an industry spokesman
said that they have hopes to get the speed up to 1200 Baud by the time of the
official rollout.
In response to this announcement, the Water Utilities Association issued a press release
outlining their plans for a competing acoustic Internet service. They pointed out
that sound travels faster in water than in gas, so they will be able to provide
lower latencies. Experts remain skeptical, however. They point out that it will
take years of additional research to solve the interference problems caused by
'flushing toilet syndrome'.
There are also rumors of work on a hybrid liquid-gas Internet service via sewer lines.
For one, the new model includes some features that Linux/UNIX don't readily support - and has some features that are very interesting.
In theory, the NT/Win2K/XP kernel already have very nice security features that UNIX doesn't support. In practice, we have Universal Plug&Play.
We shall see how well the new.NET security works in the real world. Complexity is the enemy of security. I hope that they make the.NET security API easier comprehend and use than the NT API, but I'm not very optimistic.
Another thing you can do if you have Zone Alarm is to block your mail reader from any port except SMTP/POP. You can still read the HTML-mail (minus pictures and web bugs), and the senders never find out.
Let's say thousands of people do this in some general area to save a buck or two on broadband. Even with directional antennas, the noise floor could get pretty high. How much bandwidth will any one person have left?
I remember seeing lots of clear hard drive covers
at a drive manufacturer booth at Comdex well over
a decade ago. The rythmically moving drive heads seemed to
draw almost as much attention as a cute booth babe would have.
I've seen mentioned several times in previous discussions that fusion reactors won't be environmentally friendly because the walls turn into brittle radioactive waste. I wondered why they couldn't just swap out the old brittle walls, melt them down, and reform them into new walls.
This liquid wall approach seems to be doing the same thing, but continually. Wouldn't a recycled solid wall scheme be simpler? Is there a reason it wouldn't work?
Re:The hardware is the software
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
A million people with pencils and paper can also
be used to model any computational task. Are you
proposing that such a system could somehow create
a new self-aware intelligence independent of any
of the individual pencil pushers? It's hard to imagine,
as the physical embodiment of such a system is nothing
more than patterns of graphite scribbled on paper.
A Turing machine (which is computationally equivalent both silicon computers and paper-and-pencil algorithms)
has been proven to be able compute a certain subset of mathematical proofs.
I have doubts that this necessarily implies that it can model
every phenomenon in the physical universe. It is possible
that a brain uses some to-be-discovered process
that goes beyond a simple Turing machine.
Every piece of drivel that you spew forth and put on the web is going to be permanently enshrined in its own little piece of DRAM at Google (Probably including this stupid comment.). Each bit of each every word ever put on the web is destined to be endlessly and pointlessly refreshed every few milliseconds, expending its own miniscule amount of energy and waiting in vain for that one stray alpha particle to cause a soft error and finally put it out of its misery. It seems like something Andy Warhol would have predicted.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, the fans have to download broken formats that will be unplayable in a few years, so the artists can have another Big Mac later on, courtesy of the same 1213 fans!
The whole thing was cased in a shiny metal module. Each chip had its own sping-loaded heat slug that transferred heat to the cooling liquid sent through the module's plumbing. (100 ECL chips == major kilowattage)
They told me each CPU cost about $50,000. On a factory tour, I saw an entire pallette of these sitting on the floor, kind of like gold at Fort Knox.
These things may not perform like today's chips, but they gave meaning to the term "Big Iron"
That's because prior to the early 1900's the folks in New England cut down nearly every tree in the region. They then realized that that was a mistake and have been working to rectify the situation.
The only problem is, New England is something like 1/1000th of the earth's total area. Not a very good base to extrapolate from.
As for wider counts of the number of trees, Christmas tree farms don't count as valid forests, either.
Because 5000 years of human history has shown that the side with the better weapons usually wins. Everybody wants to be a winner. That's why whole world is spending money on bigger guns.
Most likely though, after sixty years of fruitless effort I would throw in the towel. I would spend the remainder of my time drunk in my cabin: a bitter, broken lonely man, shunned by my shipmates.
Upon my death, friendless, my body would be unceremoniously dumped into the biomass recycler.
After over a decade of work, the project has recreated all of the userland DOS applications including COMMAND.COM, XCOPY.EXE, FDISK.EXE, and many more. The powerful .BAT shell language has been cloned. Even enterprise-level development environments such as QBASIC are complete.
However, the goal of creating a new, next-generation DOS kernel remains unfulfilled. Perhaps the bar was set too high. As of now, the system runs on an implementation of IO.SYS written by some Scandinavian college kid.
The days of cheap memory are over.
They say this because of the huge expense needed to provide 512MB or more of ultra fast memory. But what if they added yet another level of "cache"?
Put in 128MB or more of super-fast RAM (faster than today's RDRAM or DDRAM, maybe using an exotic bus) backed by gigs of cheap, easy-to-make memory (PC266 DDRAM or slower). The cheap ram is still orders of magnitude faster than a disk drive. Manage them with hardware that does page swapping similar to virtual memory.
You could get good system performance and lower overall cost.
Anyway, this situation will be a money-making bonanza for Lucas. They can re-release the film to theaters after a few years, this time in "full digital glory" and with 3 more minutes of previously cut scenes. All of the usual geeks will show up and shell their money out once again (OTOH, if it sucks as much as episode 1, maybe not).
Actually, they invented the fax machine almost immediately after the telegraph. You wrote the original on some kind of conducting paper and wrapped it on a xmit drum. A needle on the sending machine sent the signal over the telegraph wire to a receiving drum with a pen.
Obviously, though, they didn't use TIFF compression.
Babbage did have an actual working section of the Difference Engine, and enough parts were made to almost finish it. After a delay caused by his conflicts with his parts maker, he got distracted by his new ideas for the Analytical Engine, and never bothered to finish the original. So he was not only one of the first to do computer design, he was also one of the first examples of a very common person today: a brilliant but stubborn and impossible-to-manage developer who doesn't keep focused on deliverables. He was ahead of his time in many ways!
Me too!
For a tax like this to be really fair, they'd have to allocate a proportional share of money for the hard working, underpaid pr0n stars who's artistry surely fill up a large fraction of these disks.
Somehow, though, I don't see something like a Ron Jeremy Digital Media Performance Compensation Act making it out of a congressional committe.
Processors faster than 2GHz are dirt cheap today. High-bandwidth connections aren't cheap, and connections to home users are 3 orders of magnitude slower than an internal disk drive channel.
This kind of thing only seems to make sense for the most geek-oriented scientific types of calculations, and of those only the jobs that are trivially parallelized, like SETI. I don't see everyone changing their OS to support it.
Field tests have demonstrated bit rates in excess of 300 Baud, and an industry spokesman said that they have hopes to get the speed up to 1200 Baud by the time of the official rollout.
In response to this announcement, the Water Utilities Association issued a press release outlining their plans for a competing acoustic Internet service. They pointed out that sound travels faster in water than in gas, so they will be able to provide lower latencies. Experts remain skeptical, however. They point out that it will take years of additional research to solve the interference problems caused by 'flushing toilet syndrome'.
There are also rumors of work on a hybrid liquid-gas Internet service via sewer lines.
Perhaps you ought to turn off your AM talk radio and read this article written by someone who actually knows something about the topic.
In theory, the NT/Win2K/XP kernel already have very nice security features that UNIX doesn't support. In practice, we have Universal Plug&Play.
We shall see how well the new .NET security works in the real world. Complexity is the enemy of security. I hope that they make the .NET security API easier comprehend and use than the NT API, but I'm not very optimistic.
Another thing you can do if you have Zone Alarm is to block your mail reader from any port except SMTP/POP. You can still read the HTML-mail (minus pictures and web bugs), and the senders never find out.
Let's say thousands of people do this in some general area to save a buck or two on broadband. Even with directional antennas, the noise floor could get pretty high. How much bandwidth will any one person have left?
but now is ok for ppl 2 put 42 typos in inrnet msg & hit submitt
I don't know how bulletproof they are, but they're a snap to set up.
I remember seeing lots of clear hard drive covers at a drive manufacturer booth at Comdex well over a decade ago. The rythmically moving drive heads seemed to draw almost as much attention as a cute booth babe would have.
This liquid wall approach seems to be doing the same thing, but continually. Wouldn't a recycled solid wall scheme be simpler? Is there a reason it wouldn't work?
A Turing machine (which is computationally equivalent both silicon computers and paper-and-pencil algorithms) has been proven to be able compute a certain subset of mathematical proofs. I have doubts that this necessarily implies that it can model every phenomenon in the physical universe. It is possible that a brain uses some to-be-discovered process that goes beyond a simple Turing machine.
Why should he get a date? He got the pr0n sites working again...
Every piece of drivel that you spew forth and put on the web is going to be permanently enshrined in its own little piece of DRAM at Google (Probably including this stupid comment.). Each bit of each every word ever put on the web is destined to be endlessly and pointlessly refreshed every few milliseconds, expending its own miniscule amount of energy and waiting in vain for that one stray alpha particle to cause a soft error and finally put it out of its misery. It seems like something Andy Warhol would have predicted.