I welcome anything that could move hi-tech jobs OUT of Silicon Valley. There's a whole country out there, most of it with much lower costs of living (and fewer organic tofu-eaters.) Support the California Internet tax!
I do however wish to use a Radeon 9700 or GeForce FX, but that would be pretty pointless at a 4x bus
Not according to most benchmarks I've seen. The AGP speed mainly comes into play when the VRAM can't hold all the textures, and the card has to go to main memory. When that happens, performance will suck no matter the AGP speed, but that should be very rare with the 128MB either of those cards would pack. 8x makes a negligible difference in benchmarks of current PC games. In other words, don't make AGP 8x a sticking point in a system that meets all your other needs.
There's no way they coded 32,000 games, even if they are all on the level of pong, meaning that this is a repackaging of an existing platform. Probably wintel. A micro-ATX board with an AthlonXP and Geforce4 could easily outperform current consoles (XBox uses PIII and Geforce3.) Just make a nice pizza-box case with front-mounted USB ports, voila, a console with thousands of games.
Maybe they will stop peddling this i-software as if they were operating system features, so I don't have to pay $100 plus for needed OS bug fixes (i.e., Jaguar).
I've spent far too many hours playing games, the basic reason being that it is far easier to become successful and respected in the game community than in real life. For a long time, my ambitions for what might happen in real life were diverted to UO, because major goals were achievable on a timescale of weeks/months instead of decades.
Is it still crippleware?
on
The Be Lives!
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The "personal edition" of BeOS was essentially crippleware designed to encourage you to buy the "professional edition." It had to be installed under Windows and booted from a disk image limited to 512 MB. If there were a free version of Be without such limitations, THAT would be news. It's too late for my money to help Be, Inc.
From the article, "It's this pattern of fractal instructions, he says, that tells genes what they must do in order to form living tissue." This is a very wild claim with nothing to back it up. The concept of "gene" is a leaky abstraction in this case. There's DNA, and there are proteins. Their high level interaction is called a gene, but the work in the cell is done by proteins, not the abstraction.
Just what is this guy proposing the fractals do? What is the mechanism for reading these fractals? Until this guy can propose a specific biochemical pathway using his fractals that can't be explained on the basis of protein and transcription regulation, I won't take him seriously.
One of the fundamental problems in genetics is deciding whether a particular streach of DNA is or is not part of a gene. There are a number of very effective statistical methods for identifying genes, but they are not 100% accurate. Part of the reason is "alternative splicing" wherein a particular sequence might be an intron sometimes and an exon at other times. The whole gene, introns and exons intact, is transcribed to mRNA, then proteins splice out the introns, but in many cases, different parts may be left in or taken out, so that a single gene produces a number of related proteins. If somone tried to remove all the introns from any sort of eukaryote, it's exceedingly likely that they'd cut out something important unintentionally.
As for prokaryotes, they don't have alternative splicing, but they have very few introns to begin with. The most time-consuming step in cell division is DNA replication, so prokaryotes whose survival strategy is exponential growth are under a lot of evolutionary pressure to minimize junk DNA. It seems they don't need it, anyway. Higher organisms, however, are full of so-called "transposable elements" - essentially proto-viruses. They are genes that encode proteins that then act on the original gene, spliciing it out of the chromosome and putting it back somewhere else. The genome is full of these, along with non-functional truncated or mutated versions of them. These are mostly just parasitic.
Finally, there are the "highly non-conserved" portions of DNA. These are areas with extremely high variablility between members of a species, meaning that there is no evolutionary pressure to conserve the function. The best explanation for this is that there is no function.
Non-coding sequences can however play structural roles, since the chemistry of the nucleotide bases can introduce "kinks" into the DNA strand. These form the basis of many protein recognition sites for regulation, duplication, splicing, error correcting, etc.
We have all these ways for accounting for a lot of the DNA, but it sounds to me like this guy said to himself "Wouldn't it be cool if all this DNA were like, a fractal or something!" This would be a tremendous discovery if it were true, but the article shows no evidence that he has any clue how it might work or what it might accomplish.
The development team for Star Wars Galaxies is mostly comprised of former Ultima Online developers. The lead designer is Raph Koster, formerly known as Designer Dragon of UO. They made a prototype space game for Origin to brand as Wing Commander Online, but that was about the time EA (Origin's parent company) gutted Origin down to just the UO team and rolled it all into the EA.com division. EA tried to assign Koster's space team to the Sims Online, but they wisely made a deal with Verant to make a Star Wars game. Thus Verant's Austin division was born. There's no code in common with Everquest.
Where does that time go? I haven't implemented RSA myself, but it sounds like you just fob a few primes around. If the two-line RSA code on this site was written in two months, that's a rate of 2.36 characters per day...
This is probably a weighty issue from a legal precedent point of view, but it seems to me that anyone worried about whether the government could snoop their email was already encrypting their communication five ways to Sunday.
A CS professor once described his department to me as "selectively excellent." There are a few places like MIT or Georgia Tech that can educate you on the cutting edge of just about anything technical, but most programs just have a few highlights. Masters' programs tend to require more specialization (e.g., AI, operating systems, graphics, teaching, algorithms, etc.) than an undergraduate degree, so you should decide what that specialization might be and evaluate masters' programs by that criteria. Do keep in mind, however, your interests could shift. (That's why I passed on Georgia Tech for undergraduate study... God help you if you go there and decide you don't want to major in engineering/cs after all.)
Easy, hassle-free micropayments ( $.05) would be an incredible boon to web publishers by providing a viable business plan to supplement/replace advertisements. Anyone creating any sort of content (games, stories, news, music) to be distributed online could benefit, but not many consumers could be bothered (or really willing/trusting enough) to keep CC numbers on file with scores of different content providers. A central, trusted source is needed for this to take off - a "content escrow" that takes the money and content, then passes them both along when they're both received. It seems like PayPal, AOL, or Microsoft Passport could roll out something like this with very little trouble. AOL already has scores of CC#'s on file as well as content, but can't really afford to antagonzie their users with micropayments, when they're starting to wise up that there are much better ISPs around.
Re:Pravda apparently no longer means truth
on
We Are Not Related
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
More interesting tidbits from Pravda:
"Japan didn't capitulate in 1945"
"Therefore, what kind of anomalous events can be dangerous for planes? They are UFOs, balls of lightening, meteorites, energy fields that humans know nothing about, or even unknown forms of life in the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere."
"I hope so much for Vladimir Putin now. It seems to me that he is like Joseph Stalin. I treat Stalin with respect, and I think that he was a very wise leader."
"Fire ants, Solenopsis Invicta (invincible), are ready to destroy any and all enemies, regardless of size[...] At first, it seems that they just idle around their ant hill. However, this idling time might be used to plan well-coordinated attacks."
"Bin Laden Gives Credit Where Credit's Due - Bush and Western leaders to blame for deaths of Moscow and Bali terrorism victims"
"Although the desktop version of Longhorn is still expected within this time frame, a server version is not expected until 2005 or 2006, the company said."
A positive outlook does correlate with a higher number of immune system T-cells, increasing resistance to most infectious diseases. (Search Google if you want a reference.) It's not surprising this doesn't help with cancer, since cancer wouldn't be a problem in the first place if the immune system actually recognized it as a problem.
I don't know anything about any differences in how the BSDs handle drivers, so I'll ask, how much work would it take to make these nVidia drivers run under NetBSD or OpenBSD?
It's no secret that the OS X GUI makes massive performance sacrifices for the sake of prettiness. It's especially hard on low-memory systems, since rather than redrawing windows when you bring them to a foreground, it saves a big honking bitmap of the whole window. It doesn't take many windows before you have to start going to disk. I suppose if you have 2 gigs or so, this would be faster than redrawing, maybe. Apple's business model should be to invest in RAM manufacturers and drive RAM sales with new releases of OS X.
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I welcome anything that could move hi-tech jobs OUT of Silicon Valley. There's a whole country out there, most of it with much lower costs of living (and fewer organic tofu-eaters.) Support the California Internet tax!
Would YOU give peroxide to someone responsible for Doom and Quake?
My mother's dog is paper trained. How can I get her to clip and send me your columns instead of giving them to the dog?
I do however wish to use a Radeon 9700 or GeForce FX, but that would be pretty pointless at a 4x bus
Not according to most benchmarks I've seen. The AGP speed mainly comes into play when the VRAM can't hold all the textures, and the card has to go to main memory. When that happens, performance will suck no matter the AGP speed, but that should be very rare with the 128MB either of those cards would pack. 8x makes a negligible difference in benchmarks of current PC games. In other words, don't make AGP 8x a sticking point in a system that meets all your other needs.
There's no way they coded 32,000 games, even if they are all on the level of pong, meaning that this is a repackaging of an existing platform. Probably wintel. A micro-ATX board with an AthlonXP and Geforce4 could easily outperform current consoles (XBox uses PIII and Geforce3.) Just make a nice pizza-box case with front-mounted USB ports, voila, a console with thousands of games.
"The card actually has moveable parts inside its thin shell,"
Anyone have an idea of the mean time between failure on that?
Maybe they will stop peddling this i-software as if they were operating system features, so I don't have to pay $100 plus for needed OS bug fixes (i.e., Jaguar).
The article reports CERN has manufactured 220,000 antihydrogen atoms. How much damage could that do if they all annihilated at once?
I've spent far too many hours playing games, the basic reason being that it is far easier to become successful and respected in the game community than in real life. For a long time, my ambitions for what might happen in real life were diverted to UO, because major goals were achievable on a timescale of weeks/months instead of decades.
commercialization != centralization
The "personal edition" of BeOS was essentially crippleware designed to encourage you to buy the "professional edition." It had to be installed under Windows and booted from a disk image limited to 512 MB. If there were a free version of Be without such limitations, THAT would be news. It's too late for my money to help Be, Inc.
The day DOS will truly die is when MS no longer bothers to give Windows native ability to run DOS programs.
From the article, "It's this pattern of fractal instructions, he says, that tells genes what they must do in order to form living tissue." This is a very wild claim with nothing to back it up. The concept of "gene" is a leaky abstraction in this case. There's DNA, and there are proteins. Their high level interaction is called a gene, but the work in the cell is done by proteins, not the abstraction.
Just what is this guy proposing the fractals do? What is the mechanism for reading these fractals?
Until this guy can propose a specific biochemical pathway using his fractals that can't be explained on the basis of protein and transcription regulation, I won't take him seriously.
One of the fundamental problems in genetics is deciding whether a particular streach of DNA is or is not part of a gene. There are a number of very effective statistical methods for identifying genes, but they are not 100% accurate. Part of the reason is "alternative splicing" wherein a particular sequence might be an intron sometimes and an exon at other times. The whole gene, introns and exons intact, is transcribed to mRNA, then proteins splice out the introns, but in many cases, different parts may be left in or taken out, so that a single gene produces a number of related proteins. If somone tried to remove all the introns from any sort of eukaryote, it's exceedingly likely that they'd cut out something important unintentionally.
As for prokaryotes, they don't have alternative splicing, but they have very few introns to begin with. The most time-consuming step in cell division is DNA replication, so prokaryotes whose survival strategy is exponential growth are under a lot of evolutionary pressure to minimize junk DNA. It seems they don't need it, anyway. Higher organisms, however, are full of so-called "transposable elements" - essentially proto-viruses. They are genes that encode proteins that then act on the original gene, spliciing it out of the chromosome and putting it back somewhere else. The genome is full of these, along with non-functional truncated or mutated versions of them. These are mostly just parasitic.
Finally, there are the "highly non-conserved" portions of DNA. These are areas with extremely high variablility between members of a species, meaning that there is no evolutionary pressure to conserve the function. The best explanation for this is that there is no function.
Non-coding sequences can however play structural roles, since the chemistry of the nucleotide bases can introduce "kinks" into the DNA strand. These form the basis of many protein recognition sites for regulation, duplication, splicing, error correcting, etc.
We have all these ways for accounting for a lot of the DNA, but it sounds to me like this guy said to himself "Wouldn't it be cool if all this DNA were like, a fractal or something!" This would be a tremendous discovery if it were true, but the article shows no evidence that he has any clue how it might work or what it might accomplish.
The development team for Star Wars Galaxies is mostly comprised of former Ultima Online developers. The lead designer is Raph Koster, formerly known as Designer Dragon of UO. They made a prototype space game for Origin to brand as Wing Commander Online, but that was about the time EA (Origin's parent company) gutted Origin down to just the UO team and rolled it all into the EA.com division. EA tried to assign Koster's space team to the Sims Online, but they wisely made a deal with Verant to make a Star Wars game. Thus Verant's Austin division was born. There's no code in common with Everquest.
Where does that time go? I haven't implemented RSA myself, but it sounds like you just fob a few primes around. If the two-line RSA code on this site was written in two months, that's a rate of 2.36 characters per day...
This is probably a weighty issue from a legal precedent point of view, but it seems to me that anyone worried about whether the government could snoop their email was already encrypting their communication five ways to Sunday.
A CS professor once described his department to me as "selectively excellent." There are a few places like MIT or Georgia Tech that can educate you on the cutting edge of just about anything technical, but most programs just have a few highlights. Masters' programs tend to require more specialization (e.g., AI, operating systems, graphics, teaching, algorithms, etc.) than an undergraduate degree, so you should decide what that specialization might be and evaluate masters' programs by that criteria. Do keep in mind, however, your interests could shift. (That's why I passed on Georgia Tech for undergraduate study... God help you if you go there and decide you don't want to major in engineering/cs after all.)
Easy, hassle-free micropayments ( $.05) would be an incredible boon to web publishers by providing a viable business plan to supplement/replace advertisements. Anyone creating any sort of content (games, stories, news, music) to be distributed online could benefit, but not many consumers could be bothered (or really willing/trusting enough) to keep CC numbers on file with scores of different content providers. A central, trusted source is needed for this to take off - a "content escrow" that takes the money and content, then passes them both along when they're both received. It seems like PayPal, AOL, or Microsoft Passport could roll out something like this with very little trouble. AOL already has scores of CC#'s on file as well as content, but can't really afford to antagonzie their users with micropayments, when they're starting to wise up that there are much better ISPs around.
More interesting tidbits from Pravda:
"Japan didn't capitulate in 1945"
"Therefore, what kind of anomalous events can be dangerous for planes? They are UFOs, balls of lightening, meteorites, energy fields that humans know nothing about, or even unknown forms of life in the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere."
"I hope so much for Vladimir Putin now. It seems to me that he is like Joseph Stalin. I treat Stalin with respect, and I think that he was a very wise leader."
"Fire ants, Solenopsis Invicta (invincible), are ready to destroy any and all enemies, regardless of size[...] At first, it seems that they just idle around their ant hill. However, this idling time might be used to plan well-coordinated attacks."
"Bin Laden Gives Credit Where Credit's Due - Bush and Western leaders to blame for deaths of Moscow and Bali terrorism victims"
Obviously, it was an advance scout from the Borg collective.
"Although the desktop version of Longhorn is still expected within this time frame, a server version is not expected until 2005 or 2006, the company said."
It's in the first paragraph of the article.
A positive outlook does correlate with a higher number of immune system T-cells, increasing resistance to most infectious diseases. (Search Google if you want a reference.) It's not surprising this doesn't help with cancer, since cancer wouldn't be a problem in the first place if the immune system actually recognized it as a problem.
some interesting research in the affects of forest fires
"Affects" is a verb. "Effects" is a noun.
I don't know anything about any differences in how the BSDs handle drivers, so I'll ask, how much work would it take to make these nVidia drivers run under NetBSD or OpenBSD?
It's no secret that the OS X GUI makes massive performance sacrifices for the sake of prettiness. It's especially hard on low-memory systems, since rather than redrawing windows when you bring them to a foreground, it saves a big honking bitmap of the whole window. It doesn't take many windows before you have to start going to disk. I suppose if you have 2 gigs or so, this would be faster than redrawing, maybe. Apple's business model should be to invest in RAM manufacturers and drive RAM sales with new releases of OS X.