No...heroin makes money for drug dealers,
and MS makes your teeth and hair (figuratively)
fall out. So it's exactly the same thing.
I didn't say MS was going away, and I believe
you that it will remain a strong force ("main
force" is debatable) for a long time.
I've been "dealing" with MS since 1980, don't worry
about me, I get along just fine. That doesn't
mean I have to like it, though, and I manage
to avoid their crap more than you'd likely
believe.
But back to the point, you still don't seem to get it -- you're not
so much presenting arguments as you are serving
up your opinion on a silver platter. You like
MS. So? That still doesn't make them a force
for good. My "drug dealer" analogy was attempting
to show you that your argument rested on empty
premises. I still think it shows that.
Your pro-MS argument could be applied to
drug dealers: they give out free samples, so
who are you to criticize them? If they didn't
give it anyway, schoolkids wouldn't have any
heroin at all!
Same goes with your argument that it's
in their rational self-interest, and
that MS is widely
used in the real world. So is heroin. So, does
that make them both good?
Yes indeed, I would
in fact prefer people to
not get programming experience in school, rather than for them to
be indoctrinated by Microsoft via free samples
to get them hooked.
You can always teach yourself to program, but
undoing indoctrination is hard.
"Everyone has a right to their own opinion, but
not to their own facts". I would guess you're
not completely up on the MS facts; very few
who are, are highly pro-MS. At most they tend
to regard MS as a necessary evil with a few
mixed blessings.
(Naturally that's not to say that everyone
who's up on the facts of MS automatically
hates MS with a passion, either.)
I work (contract) at GO.com, and must make a few corrections:
First off, GO.com itself does not use this technology. As others have said, it was developed by Starwave, which is now part of the GO Network (i.e. the corporation), and their technology is (as the article said) used by espn.com, abcnews.com, etc. Just not by the GO.com portal part of the business (at least, not much so far); we've got our own unrelated portal technology. This is due to historical reasons, since originally this was several companies, now merged.
Secondly, the GO (formerly infoseek) search engine is unrelated to this story; it is a separate technology and it is not open source. (See news stories about the spin-off of Ultraseek, btw).
Thirdly, I haven't become expert in Tea personally, but it's been suggested for certain future projects at GO.com itself, since other parts of the company like it. If you know of something that does the same things but better, as some posters implied, by all means let us all know, so we'll know not to waste our time on Tea.;-)
Lastly, we support a super-light version of the GO.com portal for internet cell phones, check it out at wap.go.com (or just "go.com", which is fast to type; it'll redirect your phone to wap.go.com). Also a mildly-light site for slow speed wireless devices like Journadas; see lite.go.com. And see air.go.com for info about a version of our site targetted to wireless Palms, e.g. Palm VII. (None of which use Tea at this point in time.)
(The latter paragraph is a touch off topic, but those are the projects I work on, so...:-)
Amusing, yes, but that really is Apple's snail mail address. The street going into their headquarters is a loop, and they did indeed name it "Infinite Loop".
Only Apple is on that street, so "1 Infinite Loop" is the only address there, IIRC. It's right at freeway 280 at the DeAnza Blvd exit in Cupertino, if you're ever in the area and want to check it out -- easy to find.
By now Silicon Valley has a number of geek-named streets and such, but Apple's address is still the best of the bunch. (e.g. Downtown San Jose has a Woz Way, which is cool in its own way, but not humorous.)
That doesn't even begin to work, to solve those issues.
It is inescapable that full computational power requires increased entropy, in the general case. Just look at the most productive logic circuits known to be fully general, such as NAND, and you'll see that reversibility requires 1 state-save-bit to be saved for every output bit. Computations where 2 input bits yield one output bit are not reversible, in most cases, unless extra information is saved on every such computation.
This means that, for every N cycles of operation, at best you can expect to store N bits in order to allow reversibility, for every N cycles of operation of a universal 2-input gate.
A pentium probably uses...oh...let's say one million gates per clock cycle, on average. To make this reversible would mean saving one million bits per cycle.
A gigahertz pentium (to be released later this year) would thus require a quadrillion bits of storage per SECOND in order to be reversible.
When I have brought up this kind of objection over the last decade to fans of reversible computing and fans of low kT computing, etc, the usual rejoinder has been that the aim is not full reversibility, that's just a theoretical model that represents an unobtainable best case. A real world case would simply use all of these issues as a guideline, and would not truly be fully reversible nor would it actually attain these ultimate thermodynamical/information-theoretical limits. Instead, the goal would be to vastly reduce power, and/or clock, and indeed saved bits would be thrown away every so often (maybe once per second), and the system would enjoy the benefits of reversibility over short periods of time, not over indefinite periods of time.
Ok. That may well be extremely useful.
But that's still a far cry from the wilder claims that don't take reality into account: It is impossible to compute general functions (in any 20th century sense) with reversible computing that has finite memory -- as any real world system must).
The conclusion is that reversible computing may gain efficiency, but cannot break limits in computational power (that is, cannot change the apparent fact that P != NP).
Perhaps quantum computers can give that, if entanglement can be solved.
He was just kidding! All you have to do is read closely (always a good idea) and it becomes obvious beyond a shadow of a doubt:
Think about it.. what does an award like this say? It says "Look, you don't have to be using Microsoft Word or whatever to produce quality work. You can produce quality work using any tool that you like." Is this the kind of thing that we want to have generally-known? Absolutely not.
Rarely have I seen a purer example of extreme sarcasm than this. (But okay, it was a bit hidden in the midst of other paragraphs where it was less clear that it was sarcasm.)
P.S. Regarding vi being old fashioned...not to stir up a religious war, but it was created in 1977, so it's 22 years old. Emacs was first created about 1974, so it's 25 years old. The age difference is pretty much insignificant by now.
(And Bill Joy studied emacs before creating vi. He followed a different design path in large part because Unix only had 128k available in those days! Emacs, on the other hand, was (a) running on DEC 10's -- big machines... and (b) was implemented interpretively in Teco, not in a compiled language.)
Personally, I use vi because it is keystroke efficient, powerful (e.g. its regular expression search and replace was there years and years before Stallman added the same to emacs), does not cause repetitive stress disorder from control/alt/meta keys, and is lightweight.
I admire emacs for its boundless power, incredible array of add-ons, for its elisp language, and for its elegant underlying design (e.g. key bindings, buffer gap editing).
But it really doesn't matter which editor you prefer. Try them both. I used emacs (the Teco version) exclusively for a year and a half, long ago. It's clearly very cool... just not my current preference.
Every time I've heard of a new vi keybinding mode for emacs, I try it out, to see if I can finally switch to emacs. So far, none have them have been complete emulations.
Anyone know of a really perfect vi keybinding for emacs? At least as good as "vim" is as a clone of vi? I want ":" commands, too...)
I could never get the [Matrox] cards to handle 1024x768 [...] What could be special about them?
I very much doubt it's the card; I have my Matrox set up to go not just really high resolution, but also low res like 640x480 and even 320x240, just for completeness sake.
Therefore I would be suspicious of Xconfigurator.
BTW there's a problem in posting my modelines: they depend on your video cards dot clock, so what works for one person may not for someone else (unless they have the same video card, that is).
So.. Is higher then 1600x1200 even POSSIBLE in Xwindows or Xfree86? And if so.. HOW?:)
Of course it's possible. The only reason you have for thinking that "1600x1200" is somehow magic is that your setup has that as its max; you didn't hear anyone else say so, did you? It's the max because you (or the software tool you used) said that was the max.
X/XFree86 is supremely flexible (and wait and see when 4.0 comes out, it's going to be amazing -- not necessarily easier to configure, but even more capable than before).
I configured a max of 1800x1440 on my system, which is the maximum my video card can support with its 250 Mhz dot clock at 70 frames per second. This is made possible by two entries in my/etc/XF86Config file. One says:
That sets up the possibility of using 1800x1440. To actually use it requires that resolution to appear in a "Modes" line in the Display subsection further down:
Since 1800x1440 comes first in that list, it will be the initial resolution when I start X. Pressing ctrl-alt-PLUS and ctrl-alt-MINUS causes X to change to the next resolution (rightward or leftward, respectively) in that list.
It's quite possible that the tool you used to set up your XF86Config file would have given you higher resolutions if you had asked for them. Or perhaps it thought you had a video card dot clock maximum smaller than what it actually supports; check your documentation.
Make sure you don't exceed the specs on your video card or monitor. If you do, it's extremely likely that one or the other will die young (although extra cooling can help).
P.S. I'm listed as a contributing author for the XFree86 Matrox driver (largely for fixing some really nasty bugs), and I think that setting up modelines by hand is a real pain, and that the various tools from XFree86 and others all have sad shortcomings. Anyone who claims that it's easy either is settling for suboptimum settings, or is bragging the same way that marathon runners claim that running 10 miles a day is easy and fun.
As others have pointed out, Windows users are usually getting 60 frames per second, and very often much lower resolution (and sometimes fewer bits of color) than their hardware supports, unless they actively reconfigure it (and even most engineers never bother), so I don't think Windows is hands-down superior in this area. And to the extent that it at least is easier, that's not a credit to Microsoft, that's a matter of every hardware vendor (like Matrox and Diamond and SIII etc) writing drivers and configurations for Windows. The more they do the same help for Linux, the easier things will get for us.
Now, how are we going to email you, when you don't give your email address on/. and when your given web site also shows no trace of a "davek"???
Doh!
Anyway, a large part of the answer is that you need to do more than just "learn" a few hundred words. You could probably memorize them in a week of concentrated study (or less). But that's not enough. You need to develop conditioned reflexes of associating the meaning with the sound (and vice versa) nearly instantly and unconsciously.
Developing conditioned reflexes takes a long time. Compare this with learning a martial art, or gymnastics, or learning dozens of complicated dance routines -- all of these examples could easily take 6 months or even years.
So we shouldn't be surprised at the length of time that it takes to develop really good conditioned reflexes in language, either.
(Pity no one will ever see this comment, since I'm posting 6 days after the discussion!)
Where did you get these numbers??? They're all wrong.
The human eye percieves smooth motion at about 20 frames per second.
No. It varies depending on contrast and ambient lighting, but 60 frames per second is often cited for purposes of generalization.
TV (in the US at least) is broadcast at 24 fps
No, U.S. TV is 30 full frames per second (interleaved from 60 half frames per second to reduce flicker). European TV is 25 frames per second, due to 50 half frames per second interleaved. (In both areas, there's a historical and RF noise connection to the 60/50 hertz power lines.)
movies are usually at 30 fps
That doesn't ring a bell; I think it's actually 24 frames per second double-shuttered to give an effective 48 fps. I may be misremembering the precise numbers there.
At low resolutions used for games (640x480, 800x600), many graphics cards can supply the monitor with a vertical refresh rate of 85 Hz, but at high resolutions, all but the most expensive cards (things like cards designed for CAD, such as the FireGL cards) drop off in maximum vertical refresh rate.
Yes and no; what you said is very misleading, since recent higher end cards from Matrox, and the Nvidia TNT2, retain high frame rates even at the highest of resolutions (approaching almost 2000x2000 these days). Now it's true these are "high end cards", but that's in a consumer sense of very roughly $200, they are *not* high end CAD market cards, which can cost thousands of dollars.
I found 1024x768 to be a much more desirable resolution for playing quake. So, what use is it if the Athlon can push out frames faster than your monitor can display them???
That's largely a matter of taste. It's true that not everyone has high quality monitors, but on the other hand, a fair number of people (including gamers) do in fact have high bandwidth monitors. Your taste (and monitor) isn't everyone's.
Granted, there are other areas where fast 3D performance is a big plus (rendering movies, etc.), but for games, 70fps is absolutely pointless
Now that goes way too far. Actually, a monitor refresh rate of a minimum of 70 hertz is highly recommended to avoid perceptual flicker under adverse lighting conditions -- this varies from person to person, but many of us see flicker, at least in peripheral vision, almost always with 60 hertz displays.
If you had said "85 fps monitor refresh rate is pointless", you'd be closer to the truth, although that too is debatable for more complex reasons that we're getting into here.
(I usually use 1600x1200 32 bit color 80 hertz for non-game (2d) purposes, and for games, usually have to drop it down, since I don't yet have a TNT2 nor voodoo3. The highest res of my voodoo2 is less than that of my 2d card.)
It's not that I have it wrong, it's that the "idiot employees lacking common sense" aren't programmers in your story, they're management.
You and others are arguing for "process" to make up for a lack of common sense in management, I think, and think I'm talking about the lack in programmers. It could be lacking in either place, or both, and okay, okay, sometimes "process" can help somewhat -- but if management is full of idiots, they'll screw up implementing "process", too, for instance by making it high overhead instead of low overhead -- something I really hate, but which is more common than not.
No doubt this is similar to governments using bureaurocracy and endless procedural rules and forms and paperwork to make up for lack of talent in their work force. In the absence of top people, I suppose something has to take up the slack. And that it inevitably makes everything run at about 1% efficiency. And a lot of big companies end up in similar predicaments. Perhaps I should feel sympathy.
However, sympathy is not equal to respect for procedures and "process". My respect goes to executives, managers, and engineers who do a good job regardless of whether there are good rules telling them what to do. My respect goes to those who do a good job even despite bad rules (or no rules) and bad environment (like idiot executives above them).
People who get fanatical about "process" have just gotten mixed up about the basic fact that they are simply a patch-workaround on top of an organizational bug, not an actual bug fix.
heres a hint about the tie thing. You can always roll one up and keep it in either a Laptop case or in your pocket, and if it looks like you'll need it,then out it on, otherwise, don't bother.
A better hint is, don't bother with ties no matter what, they're a thing of the past. E.g. Steve Jobs never wears a tie, even at formal occasions (he does wear formal clothes, but in a newer tie-free style).
There are still havens of conservatism that demand ties -- perhaps (at a guess) if you were to talk business with a banker in Oklahoma.
But in Silicon Valley and other high tech areas of the world, ties largely disappeared from programmers 20 years ago, and started disappearing from executives 10 years ago, such that largely those who still wear them do so because they actually like them.
Fashion analysts say that "dress down Friday" has become a daily thing in most businesses, and is expected to become universal in another 2 to 5 years.
Sales people may need ties longer than that, but we're not talking about sales.
(Nor am I talking about your grandparent's funeral or church services etc, where it may be considered to show respect by following the old rules. YMMV.)
You're saying that, without "process" (which to me means lots of bureaucratic forms, trainings, meetings, and other time wasters), that company employees lose all track of reality and common sense, such that they don't check whether requirements are correct, and don't test for bugs?
If you are correct, then my followup theory is that those same employees will remain idiots even with tons and tons of "process".
(P.S. I've contracted at large companies, and there certainly is a lot of idiocy of various forms in them.)
A sofware development process based on the unified modeling language that is iterative, architecture-centric, use-case driven, and risk-driven. A process that is organized around the four phases: inception, elaboration, construction, and transition, and that is further organized around the five core workflows: requirements capture, analysis, design, implementation, and test. A process that is described in terms of a business model, which in turn is structured in terms of three primitive building blocks: workers, activities, and artifacts.
A software development process based on the calcified untried modeling language that is pejorative, ego-centric, useless-case driven, and whiskey-driven. A process that is disorganized around the four fazes: deception, incorporation, destruction, and tradition, and that is further disorganized around the five core workblows: money capture, bank account analysis, resign, temptation and rest. A process that is described in terms of a fictional business model, which in turn is unstructured in terms of three (very) primitive lego blocks: drunk workers, festivity, and alien artifacts.
(Presuming to turn programming into a boss-controlled manufacturing task is like trying to do the same to the creation of fine art -- it utterly misunderstands every issue. Picture race cars made out of cast concrete.)
(Art and programming both will be completely analyzable some time after the mind itself is completely understood.)
Jobs still runs Pixar. Why are you assuming that his role as acting CEO at Apple means that he's permanently away from Pixar? That's not the case. (BTW Apple is a half hour drive from his house, Pixar is an hour -- maybe less when he uses his helicopter.)
Even more importantly, after buying Pixar, Jobs poured fifty million dollars of his own money into it to make it what it is today. He certainly deserves credit for Pixar.
Very good point. Extending on that, they don't even need to emulate self-awareness to be severely dangerous. I suppose it could be possible to create non-aware "evil warbots" or some such, just as Deep Blue is good enough at chess to beat even the world champion at times, yet without being at all aware.
Although the article was a great satire, nonetheless it makes a lot of good points when taken completely literally.
Assuming that strong AI is possible, for the moment, then like any technology, it will be implemented eventually, so it's beside the point to say "oh, but we shouldn't."
So then the question is, how should we accentuate the positive while avoiding the negative possibilities?
And guess what, this article could be taken as a road map as to which issues are actually most important (teach AIs/robots the best points of humans, like love, while avoiding our worst, like murder/war). And certainly give much thought and effort to how best to integrate our creations with our society, or vice versa, or whatever works. (E.g. hiveminds may or may not be desirable, but it would be best to ponder why or why not.)
For some people all this is too much of a stretch; if so, try reading roboticist Hans Moravec's "Mind Children" (or probably his most recent book, which I haven't seen yet). Then try it again; little is a stretch after trying Moravec's ideas out.:-)
If you don't like the license, you don't buy the damn software, how hard is that to understand?
That's less than helpful, and is quite similar to saying "if you don't like the laws in the U.S., move somewhere else". One could -- but it's far more constructive to work towards making the laws in the U.S. what they should be.
Also, you're neglecting the point that it's not a license unique to a particular piece of software, it is licensing terms that would apply to all software, potentially even to free/open software, if the author chooses to have it apply.
In light of that, you're saying, "if you don't like a new idiotic law, then don't ever buy any software." I like using free/open source software just fine, but it's nice to have the freedom to buy something (e.g. a game) if I want to.
Yet these new provisions would be so draconian that they would essentially do away with my freedom to buy any software.
It's not that "the sky is falling", it's that you're putting your head in the sand like the mythical ostrich (ostriches are real, the mythical part is that they hide from danger like you do;-)
We joined the Seti-At-Home project two years ago, for what that's worth, but the project itself has only just begun...They have problems with server overload fairly often; please be patient as they figure out how to deal with these typical new-project problems.
The standard retort is "there's no such thing as Attention Deficit 'Disorder' -- the real problem is that most people have BTS: Boredom Tolerance Syndrome".
It's not irrelevent. Glide runs on Linux, so Glide-related news may be of wide interest even when it's not Linux Glide news -- after all, it may foreshadow future developments under Linux.
Also, there are a LOT of Linux enthusiasts who boot Windows in order to play games.
Lastly, Slashdot doesn't pretend to be predominantly a Linux site -- it says "News for Nerds", not "Linux news"! Articles here are about lots and lots of non-Linux topics, including lots of non-computer topics.
I would be rather sad if, when Microsoft goes out of business, Slashdot refused to run the story because it didn't mention the word Linux anywhere.;-)
(I'm being so hypothetical as to be far removed from reality, I know, I know: the story certainly would mention Linux, since that would be the reason for the demise of M$)
Most of the first responses are utterly missing the point. No one has attempted to patent an as-yet-nonexistent quantum computer, so arguing that they shouldn't do so is ludicrous. What has been patented is a number of little gadgets that do in fact work, but would only be a part of a quantum computer.
Another important point is that these components might be useful in some other invention long before a full fledged quantum computer is created.
Whether hardware patents should exist in the first place really is an utterly different issue. There must be hundreds of new patents issued every day, including design patents for new car body styles, but I don't hear people screaming of the injustice of it all every time GM cranks out yet another SUV.
Lastly, this article, and its posting on Slashdot, disappoints me for a different reason: some days ago I offered a story on a small breakthrough in quantum computing that is featured in the current issue of Nature -- a working externally controlled quantum bit.
But Slashdot prefers to run something cynical. I didn't see Paul Guinnessy interview the NEC researchers who made this latest breakthrough to see whether they thought that quantum computers were more than 20 years away or not.
I'd be surprised if someone didn't have at least a limited quantum computer in only 5-10 years, myself -- I'm a technology optimist.
Repression is what happened to my Jewish grandparents in Poland. Somebody hurt your feelings???? Oh, how sad - if you ever meet up with real repression you'll hopefully wake up in time to fight and realize what a silly ass whiner you are now
For one thing, some of us were in fact physically attacked, even threatened with deadly weapons, in high school...do we have to die in concentration camps before we're worthy of your condescension???
For another thing, repression always begins with nonviolent taunts and ostracism before it grows into beatings, deaths, and pogroms.
Lastly, even if we suffer from nothing worse than simple injustice, loss of rights, and emotional abuse, that is worthy of compassion all by itself, even if it doesn't compare with the agony and plight of others in still worse conditions.
Your lack of sympathy does you no credit; it's attitudes like that which contribute to the problem. Perhaps you're a high school principal...hopefully not, but still I'm reminded of the aphorism "if you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem." You could at least be compassionate.
They're only being repeated in the register because the register has apparently got something against AMD (they're actually talking about suing AMD elsewhere on the site - just go to their front pages, and follow a few of their other AMD links)
Try reading the article you're recommending, Should The Register sue AMD? Despite the title that caused you to make an unwarranted leap to a foregone conclusion, they're NOT suing. The title is partly tongue in cheek, and partly asking for opinions from readers, but the key part of the article says "...So we're inclinded not to be litigious."
An American lawyer is quoted in the article as offering to represent The Register, and recommended that they make certain demands before they offer to refrain from suing...but it's not the Register that said that.
Yet another example of why you should read stories (and read them reasonably carefully) before jumping to conclusions.
(But yes, it's obvious the benchmarks are fakes, as you say; as to the reliability of the Register, I don't know their track record overall, and I don't read them regularly, but I've noticed a number of articles over time that were in fact accurate and did seem to be the one of the first sources to break new news, so I wouldn't discount them out of hand, either.)
He said that Cosm would become open source on May 1, so unless that changes, this is very good news, that we've been waiting for for a couple years.
I hope that SETI At Home takes advantage of Cosm; they haven't been too slick about reinventing the wheel, so far.
Cosm should also be rather helpful merely for people who want to do their own distributed computations on a small set of home or school computers, e.g. training neural nets, ray tracing, genetic algorithms, artificial life, etc.
To date, people have had to do home grown distributed solutions over and over, which is pointless, painful, and wasteful. So I hope Cosm becomes everything it promises.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say MS was going away, and I believe you that it will remain a strong force ("main force" is debatable) for a long time.
I've been "dealing" with MS since 1980, don't worry about me, I get along just fine. That doesn't mean I have to like it, though, and I manage to avoid their crap more than you'd likely believe.
But back to the point, you still don't seem to get it -- you're not so much presenting arguments as you are serving up your opinion on a silver platter. You like MS. So? That still doesn't make them a force for good. My "drug dealer" analogy was attempting to show you that your argument rested on empty premises. I still think it shows that.
Same goes with your argument that it's in their rational self-interest, and that MS is widely used in the real world. So is heroin. So, does that make them both good?
Yes indeed, I would in fact prefer people to not get programming experience in school, rather than for them to be indoctrinated by Microsoft via free samples to get them hooked.
You can always teach yourself to program, but undoing indoctrination is hard.
"Everyone has a right to their own opinion, but not to their own facts". I would guess you're not completely up on the MS facts; very few who are, are highly pro-MS. At most they tend to regard MS as a necessary evil with a few mixed blessings.
(Naturally that's not to say that everyone who's up on the facts of MS automatically hates MS with a passion, either.)
First off, GO.com itself does not use this technology. As others have said, it was developed by Starwave, which is now part of the GO Network (i.e. the corporation), and their technology is (as the article said) used by espn.com, abcnews.com, etc. Just not by the GO.com portal part of the business (at least, not much so far); we've got our own unrelated portal technology. This is due to historical reasons, since originally this was several companies, now merged.
Secondly, the GO (formerly infoseek) search engine is unrelated to this story; it is a separate technology and it is not open source. (See news stories about the spin-off of Ultraseek, btw).
Thirdly, I haven't become expert in Tea personally, but it's been suggested for certain future projects at GO.com itself, since other parts of the company like it. If you know of something that does the same things but better, as some posters implied, by all means let us all know, so we'll know not to waste our time on Tea. ;-)
Lastly, we support a super-light version of the GO.com portal for internet cell phones, check it out at wap.go.com (or just "go.com", which is fast to type; it'll redirect your phone to wap.go.com). Also a mildly-light site for slow speed wireless devices like Journadas; see lite.go.com. And see air.go.com for info about a version of our site targetted to wireless Palms, e.g. Palm VII. (None of which use Tea at this point in time.)
(The latter paragraph is a touch off topic, but those are the projects I work on, so... :-)
Only Apple is on that street, so "1 Infinite Loop" is the only address there, IIRC. It's right at freeway 280 at the DeAnza Blvd exit in Cupertino, if you're ever in the area and want to check it out -- easy to find.
By now Silicon Valley has a number of geek-named streets and such, but Apple's address is still the best of the bunch. (e.g. Downtown San Jose has a Woz Way, which is cool in its own way, but not humorous.)
It is inescapable that full computational power requires increased entropy, in the general case. Just look at the most productive logic circuits known to be fully general, such as NAND, and you'll see that reversibility requires 1 state-save-bit to be saved for every output bit. Computations where 2 input bits yield one output bit are not reversible, in most cases, unless extra information is saved on every such computation.
This means that, for every N cycles of operation, at best you can expect to store N bits in order to allow reversibility, for every N cycles of operation of a universal 2-input gate.
A pentium probably uses...oh...let's say one million gates per clock cycle, on average. To make this reversible would mean saving one million bits per cycle.
A gigahertz pentium (to be released later this year) would thus require a quadrillion bits of storage per SECOND in order to be reversible.
When I have brought up this kind of objection over the last decade to fans of reversible computing and fans of low kT computing, etc, the usual rejoinder has been that the aim is not full reversibility, that's just a theoretical model that represents an unobtainable best case. A real world case would simply use all of these issues as a guideline, and would not truly be fully reversible nor would it actually attain these ultimate thermodynamical/information-theoretical limits. Instead, the goal would be to vastly reduce power, and/or clock, and indeed saved bits would be thrown away every so often (maybe once per second), and the system would enjoy the benefits of reversibility over short periods of time, not over indefinite periods of time.
Ok. That may well be extremely useful.
But that's still a far cry from the wilder claims that don't take reality into account: It is impossible to compute general functions (in any 20th century sense) with reversible computing that has finite memory -- as any real world system must).
The conclusion is that reversible computing may gain efficiency, but cannot break limits in computational power (that is, cannot change the apparent fact that P != NP).
Perhaps quantum computers can give that, if entanglement can be solved.
Cheers, Doug
Think about it .. what does an award like this say? It says "Look, you don't have to be using Microsoft Word or whatever to produce quality work. You can produce quality work using any tool that you like." Is this the kind of thing that we want to have generally-known? Absolutely not.
Rarely have I seen a purer example of extreme sarcasm than this. (But okay, it was a bit hidden in the midst of other paragraphs where it was less clear that it was sarcasm.)
P.S. Regarding vi being old fashioned...not to stir up a religious war, but it was created in 1977, so it's 22 years old. Emacs was first created about 1974, so it's 25 years old. The age difference is pretty much insignificant by now.
(And Bill Joy studied emacs before creating vi. He followed a different design path in large part because Unix only had 128k available in those days! Emacs, on the other hand, was (a) running on DEC 10's -- big machines... and (b) was implemented interpretively in Teco, not in a compiled language.)
Personally, I use vi because it is keystroke efficient, powerful (e.g. its regular expression search and replace was there years and years before Stallman added the same to emacs), does not cause repetitive stress disorder from control/alt/meta keys, and is lightweight.
I admire emacs for its boundless power, incredible array of add-ons, for its elisp language, and for its elegant underlying design (e.g. key bindings, buffer gap editing).
But it really doesn't matter which editor you prefer. Try them both. I used emacs (the Teco version) exclusively for a year and a half, long ago. It's clearly very cool... just not my current preference.
Every time I've heard of a new vi keybinding mode for emacs, I try it out, to see if I can finally switch to emacs. So far, none have them have been complete emulations.
Anyone know of a really perfect vi keybinding for emacs? At least as good as "vim" is as a clone of vi? I want ":" commands, too...)
I very much doubt it's the card; I have my Matrox set up to go not just really high resolution, but also low res like 640x480 and even 320x240, just for completeness sake.
Therefore I would be suspicious of Xconfigurator.
BTW there's a problem in posting my modelines: they depend on your video cards dot clock, so what works for one person may not for someone else (unless they have the same video card, that is).
I should have said that in my above note.
Of course it's possible. The only reason you have for thinking that "1600x1200" is somehow magic is that your setup has that as its max; you didn't hear anyone else say so, did you? It's the max because you (or the software tool you used) said that was the max.
X/XFree86 is supremely flexible (and wait and see when 4.0 comes out, it's going to be amazing -- not necessarily easier to configure, but even more capable than before).
I configured a max of 1800x1440 on my system, which is the maximum my video card can support with its 250 Mhz dot clock at 70 frames per second. This is made possible by two entries in my /etc/XF86Config file. One says:
# 1800x1440 @ 70Hz, 104.52 kHz hsync
ModeLine "1800x1440" 250 1800 1896 2088 2392 1440 1441 1444 1490 +HSync +VSync
That sets up the possibility of using 1800x1440. To actually use it requires that resolution to appear in a "Modes" line in the Display subsection further down:
Subsection "Display"
Depth 32
Modes "1800x1440" "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
ViewPort 0 0
EndSubsection
Since 1800x1440 comes first in that list, it will be the initial resolution when I start X. Pressing ctrl-alt-PLUS and ctrl-alt-MINUS causes X to change to the next resolution (rightward or leftward, respectively) in that list.
It's quite possible that the tool you used to set up your XF86Config file would have given you higher resolutions if you had asked for them. Or perhaps it thought you had a video card dot clock maximum smaller than what it actually supports; check your documentation.
Make sure you don't exceed the specs on your video card or monitor. If you do, it's extremely likely that one or the other will die young (although extra cooling can help).
P.S. I'm listed as a contributing author for the XFree86 Matrox driver (largely for fixing some really nasty bugs), and I think that setting up modelines by hand is a real pain, and that the various tools from XFree86 and others all have sad shortcomings. Anyone who claims that it's easy either is settling for suboptimum settings, or is bragging the same way that marathon runners claim that running 10 miles a day is easy and fun.
As others have pointed out, Windows users are usually getting 60 frames per second, and very often much lower resolution (and sometimes fewer bits of color) than their hardware supports, unless they actively reconfigure it (and even most engineers never bother), so I don't think Windows is hands-down superior in this area. And to the extent that it at least is easier, that's not a credit to Microsoft, that's a matter of every hardware vendor (like Matrox and Diamond and SIII etc) writing drivers and configurations for Windows. The more they do the same help for Linux, the easier things will get for us.
Doh!
Anyway, a large part of the answer is that you need to do more than just "learn" a few hundred words. You could probably memorize them in a week of concentrated study (or less). But that's not enough. You need to develop conditioned reflexes of associating the meaning with the sound (and vice versa) nearly instantly and unconsciously.
Developing conditioned reflexes takes a long time. Compare this with learning a martial art, or gymnastics, or learning dozens of complicated dance routines -- all of these examples could easily take 6 months or even years.
So we shouldn't be surprised at the length of time that it takes to develop really good conditioned reflexes in language, either.
(Pity no one will ever see this comment, since I'm posting 6 days after the discussion!)
The human eye percieves smooth motion at about 20 frames per second.
No. It varies depending on contrast and ambient lighting, but 60 frames per second is often cited for purposes of generalization.
TV (in the US at least) is broadcast at 24 fps
No, U.S. TV is 30 full frames per second (interleaved from 60 half frames per second to reduce flicker). European TV is 25 frames per second, due to 50 half frames per second interleaved. (In both areas, there's a historical and RF noise connection to the 60/50 hertz power lines.)
movies are usually at 30 fps
That doesn't ring a bell; I think it's actually 24 frames per second double-shuttered to give an effective 48 fps. I may be misremembering the precise numbers there.
At low resolutions used for games (640x480, 800x600), many graphics cards can supply the monitor with a vertical refresh rate of 85 Hz, but at high resolutions, all but the most expensive cards (things like cards designed for CAD, such as the FireGL cards) drop off in maximum vertical refresh rate.
Yes and no; what you said is very misleading, since recent higher end cards from Matrox, and the Nvidia TNT2, retain high frame rates even at the highest of resolutions (approaching almost 2000x2000 these days). Now it's true these are "high end cards", but that's in a consumer sense of very roughly $200, they are *not* high end CAD market cards, which can cost thousands of dollars.
I found 1024x768 to be a much more desirable resolution for playing quake. So, what use is it if the Athlon can push out frames faster than your monitor can display them???
That's largely a matter of taste. It's true that not everyone has high quality monitors, but on the other hand, a fair number of people (including gamers) do in fact have high bandwidth monitors. Your taste (and monitor) isn't everyone's.
Granted, there are other areas where fast 3D performance is a big plus (rendering movies, etc.), but for games, 70fps is absolutely pointless
Now that goes way too far. Actually, a monitor refresh rate of a minimum of 70 hertz is highly recommended to avoid perceptual flicker under adverse lighting conditions -- this varies from person to person, but many of us see flicker, at least in peripheral vision, almost always with 60 hertz displays.
If you had said "85 fps monitor refresh rate is pointless", you'd be closer to the truth, although that too is debatable for more complex reasons that we're getting into here.
(I usually use 1600x1200 32 bit color 80 hertz for non-game (2d) purposes, and for games, usually have to drop it down, since I don't yet have a TNT2 nor voodoo3. The highest res of my voodoo2 is less than that of my 2d card.)
You and others are arguing for "process" to make up for a lack of common sense in management, I think, and think I'm talking about the lack in programmers. It could be lacking in either place, or both, and okay, okay, sometimes "process" can help somewhat -- but if management is full of idiots, they'll screw up implementing "process", too, for instance by making it high overhead instead of low overhead -- something I really hate, but which is more common than not.
No doubt this is similar to governments using bureaurocracy and endless procedural rules and forms and paperwork to make up for lack of talent in their work force. In the absence of top people, I suppose something has to take up the slack. And that it inevitably makes everything run at about 1% efficiency. And a lot of big companies end up in similar predicaments. Perhaps I should feel sympathy.
However, sympathy is not equal to respect for procedures and "process". My respect goes to executives, managers, and engineers who do a good job regardless of whether there are good rules telling them what to do. My respect goes to those who do a good job even despite bad rules (or no rules) and bad environment (like idiot executives above them).
People who get fanatical about "process" have just gotten mixed up about the basic fact that they are simply a patch-workaround on top of an organizational bug, not an actual bug fix.
A better hint is, don't bother with ties no matter what, they're a thing of the past. E.g. Steve Jobs never wears a tie, even at formal occasions (he does wear formal clothes, but in a newer tie-free style).
There are still havens of conservatism that demand ties -- perhaps (at a guess) if you were to talk business with a banker in Oklahoma.
But in Silicon Valley and other high tech areas of the world, ties largely disappeared from programmers 20 years ago, and started disappearing from executives 10 years ago, such that largely those who still wear them do so because they actually like them.
Fashion analysts say that "dress down Friday" has become a daily thing in most businesses, and is expected to become universal in another 2 to 5 years.
Sales people may need ties longer than that, but we're not talking about sales.
(Nor am I talking about your grandparent's funeral or church services etc, where it may be considered to show respect by following the old rules. YMMV.)
If you are correct, then my followup theory is that those same employees will remain idiots even with tons and tons of "process".
(P.S. I've contracted at large companies, and there certainly is a lot of idiocy of various forms in them.)
A software development process based on the calcified untried modeling language that is pejorative, ego-centric, useless-case driven, and whiskey-driven. A process that is disorganized around the four fazes: deception, incorporation, destruction, and tradition, and that is further disorganized around the five core workblows: money capture, bank account analysis, resign, temptation and rest. A process that is described in terms of a fictional business model, which in turn is unstructured in terms of three (very) primitive lego blocks: drunk workers, festivity, and alien artifacts.
(Presuming to turn programming into a boss-controlled manufacturing task is like trying to do the same to the creation of fine art -- it utterly misunderstands every issue. Picture race cars made out of cast concrete.)
(Art and programming both will be completely analyzable some time after the mind itself is completely understood.)
Even more importantly, after buying Pixar, Jobs poured fifty million dollars of his own money into it to make it what it is today. He certainly deserves credit for Pixar.
Very good point. Extending on that, they don't even need to emulate self-awareness to be severely dangerous. I suppose it could be possible to create non-aware "evil warbots" or some such, just as Deep Blue is good enough at chess to beat even the world champion at times, yet without being at all aware.
Assuming that strong AI is possible, for the moment, then like any technology, it will be implemented eventually, so it's beside the point to say "oh, but we shouldn't."
So then the question is, how should we accentuate the positive while avoiding the negative possibilities?
And guess what, this article could be taken as a road map as to which issues are actually most important (teach AIs/robots the best points of humans, like love, while avoiding our worst, like murder/war). And certainly give much thought and effort to how best to integrate our creations with our society, or vice versa, or whatever works. (E.g. hiveminds may or may not be desirable, but it would be best to ponder why or why not.)
For some people all this is too much of a stretch; if so, try reading roboticist Hans Moravec's "Mind Children" (or probably his most recent book, which I haven't seen yet). Then try it again; little is a stretch after trying Moravec's ideas out. :-)
That's less than helpful, and is quite similar to saying "if you don't like the laws in the U.S., move somewhere else". One could -- but it's far more constructive to work towards making the laws in the U.S. what they should be.
Also, you're neglecting the point that it's not a license unique to a particular piece of software, it is licensing terms that would apply to all software, potentially even to free/open software, if the author chooses to have it apply.
In light of that, you're saying, "if you don't like a new idiotic law, then don't ever buy any software." I like using free/open source software just fine, but it's nice to have the freedom to buy something (e.g. a game) if I want to.
Yet these new provisions would be so draconian that they would essentially do away with my freedom to buy any software.
It's not that "the sky is falling", it's that you're putting your head in the sand like the mythical ostrich (ostriches are real, the mythical part is that they hide from danger like you do ;-)
The concept just has a certain perfection to it. ;-)
Join the team here
We joined the Seti-At-Home project two years ago, for what that's worth, but the project itself has only just begun...They have problems with server overload fairly often; please be patient as they figure out how to deal with these typical new-project problems.
Also, there are a LOT of Linux enthusiasts who boot Windows in order to play games.
Lastly, Slashdot doesn't pretend to be predominantly a Linux site -- it says "News for Nerds", not "Linux news"! Articles here are about lots and lots of non-Linux topics, including lots of non-computer topics.
I would be rather sad if, when Microsoft goes out of business, Slashdot refused to run the story because it didn't mention the word Linux anywhere. ;-)
(I'm being so hypothetical as to be far removed from reality, I know, I know: the story certainly would mention Linux, since that would be the reason for the demise of M$)
Another important point is that these components might be useful in some other invention long before a full fledged quantum computer is created.
Whether hardware patents should exist in the first place really is an utterly different issue. There must be hundreds of new patents issued every day, including design patents for new car body styles, but I don't hear people screaming of the injustice of it all every time GM cranks out yet another SUV.
Lastly, this article, and its posting on Slashdot, disappoints me for a different reason: some days ago I offered a story on a small breakthrough in quantum computing that is featured in the current issue of Nature -- a working externally controlled quantum bit.
But Slashdot prefers to run something cynical. I didn't see Paul Guinnessy interview the NEC researchers who made this latest breakthrough to see whether they thought that quantum computers were more than 20 years away or not.
I'd be surprised if someone didn't have at least a limited quantum computer in only 5-10 years, myself -- I'm a technology optimist.
For one thing, some of us were in fact physically attacked, even threatened with deadly weapons, in high school...do we have to die in concentration camps before we're worthy of your condescension???
For another thing, repression always begins with nonviolent taunts and ostracism before it grows into beatings, deaths, and pogroms.
Lastly, even if we suffer from nothing worse than simple injustice, loss of rights, and emotional abuse, that is worthy of compassion all by itself, even if it doesn't compare with the agony and plight of others in still worse conditions.
Your lack of sympathy does you no credit; it's attitudes like that which contribute to the problem. Perhaps you're a high school principal...hopefully not, but still I'm reminded of the aphorism "if you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem." You could at least be compassionate.
Try reading the article you're recommending, Should The Register sue AMD? Despite the title that caused you to make an unwarranted leap to a foregone conclusion, they're NOT suing. The title is partly tongue in cheek, and partly asking for opinions from readers, but the key part of the article says "...So we're inclinded not to be litigious."
An American lawyer is quoted in the article as offering to represent The Register, and recommended that they make certain demands before they offer to refrain from suing...but it's not the Register that said that.
Yet another example of why you should read stories (and read them reasonably carefully) before jumping to conclusions.
(But yes, it's obvious the benchmarks are fakes, as you say; as to the reliability of the Register, I don't know their track record overall, and I don't read them regularly, but I've noticed a number of articles over time that were in fact accurate and did seem to be the one of the first sources to break new news, so I wouldn't discount them out of hand, either.)
I hope that SETI At Home takes advantage of Cosm; they haven't been too slick about reinventing the wheel, so far.
Cosm should also be rather helpful merely for people who want to do their own distributed computations on a small set of home or school computers, e.g. training neural nets, ray tracing, genetic algorithms, artificial life, etc.
To date, people have had to do home grown distributed solutions over and over, which is pointless, painful, and wasteful. So I hope Cosm becomes everything it promises.