The future is not 12-digit phone numbers. The future is IP addresses. Dial your phone johndoe.phone.home.com. Once we go to IPv6 and 128-bit IP addresses, phone numbers will seem quaint. --
Patrick Doyle
How fast is Mach 1.5 if there is no air up there to transmit sound?
I think there must be a little bit of air at 31 miles up. Satellites can't maintain orbit below about 500 miles because of atmospheric drag. --
Patrick Doyle
I have to disagree. Just because you didn't like the whiny teenager character doesn't mean the acting was poor. Do you think Shelly Long was a bad actor in Cheers just because her character Diane was so annoying? --
Patrick Doyle
Hey, don't call the whole Slashdot community ignorant because of ME.:-)
Your points are all valid ones. The truth is that I don't know. But it seems highly unlikely to me that $2 million is required. I suspect they don't want to do it, so they bill at the most expensive person's rate for the worst-case amount of time. That is, something like $400/hr for 50,000 pictures, each taking one entire hour.
If it will take them $2 million and a year to do this, then they must have made grave errors in designing the site. To me, it's akin to asking a mechanic to change all the tires on your car, and he says it will cost $2 million and take a year. Well, then he's not a very good mechanic, and maybe you ought to take your business elsewhere.
Except that the Olympic comittee is stuck with IBM. --
Patrick Doyle
Within 10 years, in fact, silicon will fall to the computer scientist's triple curse: "It's bulky, it's slow, and it runs too hot." At this point, computers will need a new architecture, one that depends less on electrons and more on... well...what else? Optics.
And guess what is one of the more promising materials for optical computing? Silicon. Silicon is transparent at the wavelengths used in optical data transmissions, and Silicon Dioxide is opaque. --
Patrick Doyle
Steve Mann is a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, of which I am a student. I've seen his linux-powered watch. Most of the time he just runs a full-screen xclock on it.
They have appologized for the incident, and changed their company policy to prevent this from happening again. If that's not taking responsibility, then what is? Please, I'm not being facetious here: what exactly would you have wanted them to do?
Everyone wants to be a judge; just wait until you're a defendant. -- Patrick Doyle
Yebbut I must have read 25 articles with no spoiler before I got to this one. I think very few of the comments actually mentioned the person who supposedly won. Would it be that much trouble for the others to have a spoiler warning?
Personally I don't care, but you really ought to have warnings for this kind of thing. -- Patrick Doyle
Do you think this is a true bug, or is CBS doing it on purpose (with the "wrong people" crossed out) to increase interest in the show?
I know it's hard to believe, people, but sometimes big companies do dumb things. Yes, it's true. Remember Coke Classic?
Survivor is #1 in the ratings. They have no particular need to increase interest in the show, and even if they did, making people think they know how it ends would certainly not increase their viewership.
CBS stands to loose boatloads of cash if people think they know who will win. IMHO it's extremely unlikely that this was deliberate. -- Patrick Doyle
I think they would have been better off putting the Japanese version of the site through Babelfish rather than trying to translate it themselves.
Still, very cool. I remember seeing this a few years ago, and I couldn't believe there wasn't a small person in the suit. The motions seem quite natural. -- Patrick Doyle
They make it sound as though a system is either "trusted" or "non-trusted". However, how many formally-proven systems do you actually ever use? Probably not very many.
Of the remainder, I trust the open-source programs more than the closed-source ones as far as security goes. -- Patrick Doyle
What I'd like to see, in a world swarming with potential nanotech viruses, is an analogous nanotech immune system to take care of them, nanites which can be set to recognize and rip apart other nanites which meet certain parameters. Got a rogue oil-spill cleaning nanite ripping up asphalt in San Francisco? Get the standby security nanites in Oakland to kill it.
Yes, absolutely. This is the only way to combat nanotech-gone-bad. Think about it: we have already decided that nanotech will be more powerful than anything else we have invented; how could anything but nanotech defeat it?
Your scheme also has a nice self-regulating aspect: if one "nanophage" in a million mutates, the other 999,999 ought to eat it immediately. -- Patrick Doyle
In a word, that's where systems research is. Even if we accept that MS operating systems are the best available for single-cpu machines (which IMVHO is totally laughable), SMP machines are questionable, and DSM and cluster machines are much better off running something else.
Take a look at K42 for instance. It is the next generation of a system called Tornado which beat systems like Irix not only in scalability, but also in raw performance.
You think 32 processors makes your program run 32 times faster? Programs not specifically designed for scalability may typically run 5 times faster, and if you're not careful with cache coherence, it could be 100 times slower than on a single CPU!
There are plenty of system-level questions left to answer. -- Patrick Doyle
The theory of relativity incorporates the speed of light as its speed and time limit, and from there it is a simple matter (when expressed in equations) to show that FTL events propagate backwards in time.
Fine. I'm not saying that FTL signals don't travel backward in time. I was simply saying that the explanation given in the post I replied to was bogus. -- Patrick Doyle
Again, I'll freely admit that I don't understand the first thing about relativity.
So why even post this?
Special relativity works like this:
Normally, if you're on a train moving at velocity V, and you walk forward at velocity W, you would think that your velocity relative to the ground would by V+W. Well, you'd be wrong. It's very close to V+W, but is actually a bit less thanks to Special Relativity. This is no fiction; it's a measurable phenomenon (perhaps not with people walking on trains, but it's measurable in other situations).
This "little bit" grows as you move faster, to the point that if V and W are almost the speed of light you don't move anywhere close to V+W. Relativity always comspires to give you a combined velocity less than c.
one moment you're going 'c'-0.000001 and all is peachy; the next moment, you're going 'c' and the very fundamentals of perception change?
Not at all. Things would be very, very different at 'c'-0.000001. Relativity is not something that "kicks in" at the speed of light. You experience it even taking a leisurely stroll on a train.
Slashdot Mirror
"Informative"? This guy was so quick to post for karma that he apparently didn't bother to read Science's policy. :-)
The information will be freely available if you don't want to commercialize it.
Of course, they do have that 1MB-limit problem...
--
Patrick Doyle
The future is not 12-digit phone numbers. The future is IP addresses. Dial your phone johndoe.phone.home.com. Once we go to IPv6 and 128-bit IP addresses, phone numbers will seem quaint.
--
Patrick Doyle
There's exactly one reason that nobody calls it "GNU/Linux". Let's face it, "GNU" is a stupid name that people feel embarrassed even to utter.
(Oh well, that karma was fun while it lasted...)
--
Patrick Doyle
I feel like I'm in Star Trek...
3D plot of satellites
--
Patrick Doyle
How fast is Mach 1.5 if there is no air up there to transmit sound?
I think there must be a little bit of air at 31 miles up. Satellites can't maintain orbit below about 500 miles because of atmospheric drag.
--
Patrick Doyle
This guy seems to have a clue.
--
Patrick Doyle
Why couldn't they implement both algorithms, and have users choose between them with "make menuconfig"?
--
Patrick Doyle
Mark Hamill sucked pretty bad in Star Wars
I have to disagree. Just because you didn't like the whiny teenager character doesn't mean the acting was poor. Do you think Shelly Long was a bad actor in Cheers just because her character Diane was so annoying?
--
Patrick Doyle
Hey, don't call the whole Slashdot community ignorant because of ME. :-)
Your points are all valid ones. The truth is that I don't know. But it seems highly unlikely to me that $2 million is required. I suspect they don't want to do it, so they bill at the most expensive person's rate for the worst-case amount of time. That is, something like $400/hr for 50,000 pictures, each taking one entire hour.
Do you know how big the site is?
--
Patrick Doyle
If it will take them $2 million and a year to do this, then they must have made grave errors in designing the site. To me, it's akin to asking a mechanic to change all the tires on your car, and he says it will cost $2 million and take a year. Well, then he's not a very good mechanic, and maybe you ought to take your business elsewhere.
Except that the Olympic comittee is stuck with IBM.
--
Patrick Doyle
"Years now"? Google has only existed for a year and a half.
--
Patrick Doyle
And guess what is one of the more promising materials for optical computing? Silicon. Silicon is transparent at the wavelengths used in optical data transmissions, and Silicon Dioxide is opaque.
--
Patrick Doyle
Steve Mann is a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, of which I am a student. I've seen his linux-powered watch. Most of the time he just runs a full-screen xclock on it.
--
Patrick Doyle
They have appologized for the incident, and changed their company policy to prevent this from happening again. If that's not taking responsibility, then what is? Please, I'm not being facetious here: what exactly would you have wanted them to do?
Everyone wants to be a judge; just wait until you're a defendant.
--
Patrick Doyle
Yebbut I must have read 25 articles with no spoiler before I got to this one. I think very few of the comments actually mentioned the person who supposedly won. Would it be that much trouble for the others to have a spoiler warning?
Personally I don't care, but you really ought to have warnings for this kind of thing.
--
Patrick Doyle
Coke Classic wasn't the mistake. New Coke was. Coke Classic was the solution.
Heh heh. Heh. Yeah, that's what I meant.
--
Patrick Doyle
Hey butt-munch, how about a spoiler warning?
--
Patrick Doyle
Do you think this is a true bug, or is CBS doing it on purpose (with the "wrong people" crossed out) to increase interest in the show?
I know it's hard to believe, people, but sometimes big companies do dumb things. Yes, it's true. Remember Coke Classic?
Survivor is #1 in the ratings. They have no particular need to increase interest in the show, and even if they did, making people think they know how it ends would certainly not increase their viewership.
CBS stands to loose boatloads of cash if people think they know who will win. IMHO it's extremely unlikely that this was deliberate.
--
Patrick Doyle
I think they would have been better off putting the Japanese version of the site through Babelfish rather than trying to translate it themselves.
Still, very cool. I remember seeing this a few years ago, and I couldn't believe there wasn't a small person in the suit. The motions seem quite natural.
--
Patrick Doyle
IBM is known for applying it's research to products.
:-)
As a grammar nazi, you ought to know that this is supposed to be "its", not "it's".
--
Patrick Doyle
They make it sound as though a system is either "trusted" or "non-trusted". However, how many formally-proven systems do you actually ever use? Probably not very many.
Of the remainder, I trust the open-source programs more than the closed-source ones as far as security goes.
--
Patrick Doyle
What I'd like to see, in a world swarming with potential nanotech viruses, is an analogous nanotech immune system to take care of them, nanites which can be set to recognize and rip apart other nanites which meet certain parameters. Got a rogue oil-spill cleaning nanite ripping up asphalt in San Francisco? Get the standby security nanites in Oakland to kill it.
Yes, absolutely. This is the only way to combat nanotech-gone-bad. Think about it: we have already decided that nanotech will be more powerful than anything else we have invented; how could anything but nanotech defeat it?
Your scheme also has a nice self-regulating aspect: if one "nanophage" in a million mutates, the other 999,999 ought to eat it immediately.
--
Patrick Doyle
Take a look at K42 for instance. It is the next generation of a system called Tornado which beat systems like Irix not only in scalability, but also in raw performance.
You think 32 processors makes your program run 32 times faster? Programs not specifically designed for scalability may typically run 5 times faster, and if you're not careful with cache coherence, it could be 100 times slower than on a single CPU!
There are plenty of system-level questions left to answer.
--
Patrick Doyle
Fine. I'm not saying that FTL signals don't travel backward in time. I was simply saying that the explanation given in the post I replied to was bogus.
--
Patrick Doyle
Again, I'll freely admit that I don't understand the first thing about relativity.
So why even post this?
Special relativity works like this:
Normally, if you're on a train moving at velocity V, and you walk forward at velocity W, you would think that your velocity relative to the ground would by V+W. Well, you'd be wrong. It's very close to V+W, but is actually a bit less thanks to Special Relativity. This is no fiction; it's a measurable phenomenon (perhaps not with people walking on trains, but it's measurable in other situations).
This "little bit" grows as you move faster, to the point that if V and W are almost the speed of light you don't move anywhere close to V+W. Relativity always comspires to give you a combined velocity less than c.
one moment you're going 'c'-0.000001 and all is peachy; the next moment, you're going 'c' and the very fundamentals of perception change?
Not at all. Things would be very, very different at 'c'-0.000001. Relativity is not something that "kicks in" at the speed of light. You experience it even taking a leisurely stroll on a train.
--
Patrick Doyle