Hmmm... I dont get the idea of an archive of documents (i.e. static snapshots) of the most dynamic medium ever... Oh, well, a coupla of suggestions anyways: * The List of Lists (pick a few good dates). * The list of Internet resources (same). * The 'Good Times' virus, second only to the Worm. * A posting by 'Hasan B. Mutlu'... probably the most successful AI to-date...
Yep, I am pretty sure it's the same thing --I used to consume a lot of Pepsi Max when I lived in Europe a year ago; came back to the US after a long absence and picked up Pepsi One: same thing, Max is a little bit sweeter, IMHO.
No big surprise there; those of you who who spent significant amounts of time on both sides of the Atlantic and are caffeine-addicted would probably agree that the Euro versions are usually a bit sweeter than the US (but with little less flavor tho). E.g. Euro Coke (not Coca-Cola Classic, the can and design are slightly different, Coca-cola never changed the formula in Europe, AFAIK) doesnt use corn syrup but plain sugar; actually it'd taste more like US Pepsi if it werent for Pepsi's vanilla flavor (which the Euro version has less of).
But if you think Pepsi One is bad, you havent tasted Euro 'Coca Cola Light' (not 'Diet Coke') which is absolutely horrible...
Hehe... I could go on... You have to go down to Atlanta and visit the World of Coca-Cola;-)...
Err... lemme see: the ancient Greeks developed philosophy and the scientific method (never mind math) mostly as a counterweight to the popular dodecatheon religion --which most scholars of the time did not accept. Pythagoras (he of the theorem) went too far in that respect by accepting arithmetic as god-like, with certain numbers being more 'magical' than others (3, 7, 9, etc).
Socrates (who is arguably the true father of Western culture and way of thinking) was an agnostic --he didnot believe in the Olympian gods and was searching for a 'god' but mostly, he spoke of man-as-God.
The Arabs invented algebra also as a means to a 'magic', in the old alchemistic quest for the touchstone. Magic is, almost by definition, a negation of religion, a search for a super-power that anybody can use.
The Jews have their own mystical-magical respect in Judaism, the kabalah, which to me seems very Pythagorean-like, with letters in the place of numbers. It's out of the kabalah that many modern 'beliefs' come from, like '666' as the sign of the beast, etc.
If you look closely, I think you will find that true scientific and social progress has not been made because of the belief in any one religion but because of doubt, questioning and the search for God, for a higher or deeper meaning.
I agree with the other comments that said that the 'bounty' model will re-introduce duplication of effort and wasted man-hours into coding as people compete to accomplish the same thing with only one result being accepted. In order for this to work, it must use the cooperative scheme of the OS community... but how?
I think the solution to this is also an answer to a much older question: how are you gonna judge the relative contribution of each team member to a team effort? how are you gonna do that quantitavely in a manner that will be accepted as fair by all members of the group?
If you find a solution to that, you could solve a lot of productivity issues in the real world as well;-)...
My half-assed stab at a solution would be a point system: first gather a team of people interested in your project. Have the team break the project down into smaller parts and assign 'points' to each part acording to its relative difficulty and importance.
Then, give percentages of each module's points to team members in proportion with the time they spent on each module. Give also a fixed percentage of a module's points for debugging (say 5%) other people's code... That way you encourage people to work more, not less, to debug code and --in the process of debugging-- review the entire code tree.
I dount the end result would be 100% fair, but it will probably be close... and a system like that won't close off the team, leaving the project OS from the start... It's also recursive: if a module is too big, it can be broken down again... I dunno... just brainstorming...
Maybe it's the BEST thing that happened to Linux..
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Cool PC Cases
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· Score: 2
I can't believe the comments I am reading: granted, the Bunnymen are creepy as hell, the cases arent the prettiest thing ever designed, but the idea is good: do away with old, obsolete standards, make PCs more attractive to John Q Public.
Planned obsolescence is good; it cuts down on unit prices for IHVs and OEMs. Those savings are bound to trickle down to the consumer in this hyper-competitive industry of ours... And flexible systems will still be around for people like us --and business users. We may have to pay a premium for them, but the cost savings from the more high-performance hardware will more than make up for it.
More people on the Internet is also good (can't anybody around here remember the pre-1994 days? yeah, when 2400 baud rained supreme... not much on the Net back then, huh? unless you count wuarchive or fsp;-) More people -> bigger market for companies -> lower per unit costs (amortization anyone?) -> lower prices. Also, more Net-users means more bandwidth not less... when the other 70% of the USA (much less the world) gets online, then it would make more sense for telecomms to bring fiber to our doorsteps...
But the real kicker is that this could be the best thing that ever happened to Linux: these idiot-proof boxes (that will probably boot straight into AOL) need rock-stable, maintenance free OSes... Now, that means win9x is out, so MS can load them with either CE or NT. Problem is neither of these does the second killer-ap (after Net access): games. On the other hand, Linux can be trimmed down to fit on those little playthings, and Linux game support is already taking off... I am not even a Linux user yet (I am working on it;-) but I'd like to see plans for Linux on FlexATX boxes ASAP...
Just my $.02
Re:damn. Thought the stats were better
on
Empeg Shipping
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· Score: 1
FYI, a 12-20 mph collision (a fender-bender in other words) can *easily* produce 200-300G at the frame (not what the passenger 'feels' --what the structure does).
I certainly hope they have some good absorbers on that HD...
I am not a mathematician. I don't know that much about chaos theory. But I have used Crays, SGIs, IBM SP/2s, even KSRs since I was 20. Right now I am struggling with a computer model of a car, so you could say I am a 'deep computing' power user.
With all of Mr. Katz's optimism, he doesn't seem to know what these things do: they crunch numbers. A lot of numbers, really, really fast. That's all. What bigger, faster machines allow people like me to do is solve bigger and more complex problems that we already know how to solve.
See the point? We know how to model a car (which is what I do, or an airplane engine, an oil reservoir, a skyscraper, we can even make a damn good approximation of a city's weather (the accuracy of which, BTW, is a function, AFAIK, of data points not computing power, and even with all the resolution in the world, you can't get much better forecasts than for a week or so, because chaos kicks in) but we have no idea how to computationally solve social problems.
Now, say, you gather really, really, good info on homelessness and poverty in America, and then trained a great neural network on a massive IBM SP/2 to crunch that data, what will you get? correlations, which any scientist knows are only clues, not answers, not cause and effect. In the absense of a good understanding and of good ideas behind a certain problem, really big and expensive calculators are not much better than my old HP-48.
Case in point: I was peripeherally involved, a few years ago with the effort to make the NASP (National Aerospace Plane, aka X-30), a multi-billion dollar fluke. The great thing about the X-30 is that it was supposed to fly so fast, we had to simulate everything computationally. NASA and the DoD had all the computing power in the world to solve that one. Well, because of the absence of good physics theory wrt to what happens to an airplane at speeds greater than Mach, I dunno, 15 or so, the NASP was cancelled.
We need thinkers, not calculators, software not hardware. So, look around: what is much more important is that fast number-crunching becomes affordable to more institutions and even individuals; then the engineers and mathematicians of the world (and much, much later, the social scientists) can play with new theories and new algorithms. And this site has actively supported Beowulf, the greatest perhaps effort towards that.
In the long run, Beowulf will be much more important than 'Deep Computing'...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... I dont get the idea of an archive of documents (i.e. static snapshots) of the most dynamic medium ever... Oh, well, a coupla of suggestions anyways: ... probably the most successful AI to-date...
* The List of Lists (pick a few good dates).
* The list of Internet resources (same).
* The 'Good Times' virus, second only to the Worm.
* A posting by 'Hasan B. Mutlu'
Yep, I am pretty sure it's the same thing --I used to consume a lot of Pepsi Max when I lived in Europe a year ago; came back to the US after a long absence and picked up Pepsi One: same thing, Max is a little bit sweeter, IMHO.
;-)...
No big surprise there; those of you who who spent significant amounts of time on both sides of the Atlantic and are caffeine-addicted would probably agree that the Euro versions are usually a bit sweeter than the US (but with little less flavor tho). E.g. Euro Coke (not Coca-Cola Classic, the can and design are slightly different, Coca-cola never changed the formula in Europe, AFAIK) doesnt use corn syrup but plain sugar; actually it'd taste more like US Pepsi if it werent for Pepsi's vanilla flavor (which the Euro version has less of).
But if you think Pepsi One is bad, you havent tasted Euro 'Coca Cola Light' (not 'Diet Coke') which is absolutely horrible...
Hehe... I could go on... You have to go down to Atlanta and visit the World of Coca-Cola
Err... lemme see: the ancient Greeks developed philosophy and the scientific method (never mind math) mostly as a counterweight to the popular dodecatheon religion --which most scholars of the time did not accept. Pythagoras (he of the theorem) went too far in that respect by accepting arithmetic as god-like, with certain numbers being more 'magical' than others (3, 7, 9, etc).
Socrates (who is arguably the true father of Western culture and way of thinking) was an agnostic --he didnot believe in the Olympian gods and was searching for a 'god' but mostly, he spoke of man-as-God.
The Arabs invented algebra also as a means to a 'magic', in the old alchemistic quest for the touchstone. Magic is, almost by definition, a negation of religion, a search for a super-power that anybody can use.
The Jews have their own mystical-magical respect in Judaism, the kabalah, which to me seems very Pythagorean-like, with letters in the place of numbers. It's out of the kabalah that many modern 'beliefs' come from, like '666' as the sign of the beast, etc.
If you look closely, I think you will find that true scientific and social progress has not been made because of the belief in any one religion but because of doubt, questioning and the search for God, for a higher or deeper meaning.
Just ask Copernicus.
I agree with the other comments that said that the 'bounty' model will re-introduce duplication of effort and wasted man-hours into coding as people compete to accomplish the same thing with only one result being accepted. In order for this to work, it must use the cooperative scheme of the OS community... but how?
;-)...
... That way you encourage people to work more, not less, to debug code and --in the process of debugging-- review the entire code tree.
I think the solution to this is also an answer to a much older question: how are you gonna judge the relative contribution of each team member to a team effort? how are you gonna do that quantitavely in a manner that will be accepted as fair by all members of the group?
If you find a solution to that, you could solve a lot of productivity issues in the real world as well
My half-assed stab at a solution would be a point system: first gather a team of people interested in your project. Have the team break the project down into smaller parts and assign 'points' to each part acording to its relative difficulty and importance.
Then, give percentages of each module's points to team members in proportion with the time they spent on each module. Give also a fixed percentage of a module's points for debugging (say 5%) other people's code
I dount the end result would be 100% fair, but it will probably be close... and a system like that won't close off the team, leaving the project OS from the start... It's also recursive: if a module is too big, it can be broken down again... I dunno... just brainstorming...
I can't believe the comments I am reading: granted, the Bunnymen are creepy as hell, the cases arent the prettiest thing ever designed, but the idea is good: do away with old, obsolete standards, make PCs more attractive to John Q Public.
;-) More people -> bigger market for companies -> lower per unit costs (amortization anyone?) -> lower prices. Also, more Net-users means more bandwidth not less... when the other 70% of the USA (much less the world) gets online, then it would make more sense for telecomms to bring fiber to our doorsteps...
;-) but I'd like to see plans for Linux on FlexATX boxes ASAP...
Planned obsolescence is good; it cuts down on unit prices for IHVs and OEMs. Those savings are bound to trickle down to the consumer in this hyper-competitive industry of ours... And flexible systems will still be around for people like us --and business users. We may have to pay a premium for them, but the cost savings from the more high-performance hardware will more than make up for it.
More people on the Internet is also good (can't anybody around here remember the pre-1994 days? yeah, when 2400 baud rained supreme... not much on the Net back then, huh? unless you count wuarchive or fsp
But the real kicker is that this could be the best thing that ever happened to Linux: these idiot-proof boxes (that will probably boot straight into AOL) need rock-stable, maintenance free OSes... Now, that means win9x is out, so MS can load them with either CE or NT. Problem is neither of these does the second killer-ap (after Net access): games. On the other hand, Linux can be trimmed down to fit on those little playthings, and Linux game support is already taking off... I am not even a Linux user yet (I am working on it
Just my $.02
FYI, a 12-20 mph collision (a fender-bender in other words) can *easily* produce 200-300G at the frame (not what the passenger 'feels' --what the structure does).
I certainly hope they have some good absorbers on that HD...
I prefer a shotgun or a sniper's rifle when I'm huntin' ;-)...
I am not a mathematician. I don't know that much about chaos theory. But I have used Crays, SGIs, IBM SP/2s, even KSRs since I was 20. Right now I am struggling with a computer model of a car, so you could say I am a 'deep computing' power user.
With all of Mr. Katz's optimism, he doesn't seem to know what these things do: they crunch numbers. A lot of numbers, really, really fast. That's all. What bigger, faster machines allow people like me to do is solve bigger and more complex problems that we already know how to solve.
See the point? We know how to model a car (which is what I do, or an airplane engine, an oil reservoir, a skyscraper, we can even make a damn good approximation of a city's weather (the accuracy of which, BTW, is a function, AFAIK, of data points not computing power, and even with all the resolution in the world, you can't get much better forecasts than for a week or so, because chaos kicks in) but we have no idea how to computationally solve social problems.
Now, say, you gather really, really, good info on homelessness and poverty in America, and then trained a great neural network on a massive IBM SP/2 to crunch that data, what will you get? correlations, which any scientist knows are only clues, not answers, not cause and effect. In the absense of a good understanding and of good ideas behind a certain problem, really big and expensive calculators are not much better than my old HP-48.
Case in point: I was peripeherally involved, a few years ago with the effort to make the NASP (National Aerospace Plane, aka X-30), a multi-billion dollar fluke. The great thing about the X-30 is that it was supposed to fly so fast, we had to simulate everything computationally. NASA and the DoD had all the computing power in the world to solve that one. Well, because of the absence of good physics theory wrt to what happens to an airplane at speeds greater than Mach, I dunno, 15 or so, the NASP was cancelled.
We need thinkers, not calculators, software not hardware. So, look around: what is much more important is that fast number-crunching becomes affordable to more institutions and even individuals; then the engineers and mathematicians of the world (and much, much later, the social scientists) can play with new theories and new algorithms. And this site has actively supported Beowulf, the greatest perhaps effort towards that.
In the long run, Beowulf will be much more important than 'Deep Computing'...
Just my $0.02...