For the near-layman, this means you can represent numbers like 0.1 precisely. When 0.1 is converted into binary representation, there is no exact* representation.
With decimal representation, this is possible.
* finite, i.e. not infinitely long, like 0.777777...
Hmmmm, 5 billion instructions per second divided by 186,000 miles per second * 5280 feet per mile * 12 inches per foot = 2.36 inches per instruction at the speed of light.
He should have said "width of your hand" instead. Mod -1 Poorly Chosen Analogy Due To Innumeracy
> Climate Change Finally Impacts Important Industry
and
> Climate change to impact beer: scientist
What's not funny is nobody listens. In 20 years, when this doesn't happen (in the absence of government controls) because capitalism has risen to the occasion, will anybody remember?
Of course not.
Yet Australian beer will be cheaper and plentiful in Australia then, presuming the government doesn't put in price controls, or mandates on hops production, or some other BS.
The amount used by drilling is vanishingly small compared to the total area. You, like many, suffer from innumeracy.
This isn't about oil, or finding oil, or producing oil, or protecting a few square miles. It's about power and touting BS to the masses that make them feel good as they live out their lives thousands of miles away in a concrete canyon.
I think it causes the blood vessels to expand, hence the drunk's bulbous nose. And if you're still out in the cold, expanding the capillaries on your skin is the last thing you want to do.
> is to marry that photorealism with software that can render images in > real-time - defined as a refresh rate of 30 frames per second.
Ummmmm, my own experience is you need at least 60-70 fps to achieve the smoothness necessary to seem truly realistic.
The old Quake game showed this. Moving to the "Open GL-capable" cards (3dfx, PowerVR) gave a significant improvement in scene imagery, but the old software renderer generated super-fast frame rates on newer (for the time) machines that, while very blocky, were also like looking through a window rather than looking at a picture. A blocky world, but very smooth.
I know there's this "30 fps is enuf, that's all your eye can see the differences" meme floating around, but that's not counting the flickers at the edge of awareness, which, for me anyway, doesn't disappear until 60-70 fps.
And in any case, modern cards that can do better than that with, say, World of Warcraft, also suffer from the dynamic loading issues, where you start to move and more distant stuff starts being loaded into the card, causing a brief slowdown in framerates. This also busts the high fps realism.
> 'Graphics Turing Test': 'a computer can be considered intelligent if it > can create an artificial world capable of fooling a person into believing > it is the real thing.'
"Ahhh, you almost had me fooled! But I am a Slashdotter, and know that no chick who looks like Natalie Portman and Jessica Alba's love child would ever want to haul me into a bar bathroom and give me a hummer!"
> are brought for improper purposes of obtaining discovery, getting publicity, and intimidation
Ummm, that's what copyright is for, so the owners can go after the copyright violaters, including discovery, getting publicity (to discourage others), and intimidation (to discourage others.) Penalties are intimidation.
Now if you view it as a SLAPP- or Scientology-style attack, designed to intimidate by deliberately driving up costs, then you may have a point.
In some sci-fi I read a long time ago, they estimated a black hole would have to be about 1 cm in size before it would consume faster than it evaporated, if dropped into the Earth.
So you'd only have to worry about a black hole "eating" the Earth if it were about one centimeter in size. It's doubtful the LHC will create any such thing larger than a subatomic particle.
I assume the sci-fi was based on some numbers a real scientist ran somewhere.
Some kind of exotic, lower-energy matter is another story entirely though.
And is Blizzard supposed to throw away hundreds of thousands of man hours because someone wants to whip up a fake server to run with their client?
I'm not saying the logic of this particular trial is not iffy, but if there's no legal way for a company to make a client to only run with their server, you'll get fewer WoW type games in the future.
Where's all the similar-quality open-source client/server combos, with a hundred dungeons and lands and spells and so on, all fleshed out with nice and unique graphics?
In Dungeon and Dragons Online, it suffered from the same problem -- people running the dungeons over and over again.
And over and over and over.
And over some more.
But once...just once...I got into a group and we went into a dungeon. "What do we do?" "I don't know." "I don't know, either." None of the five of us had done it before.
And it was light years more fun, exploring slowly, figuring out the puzzles.
That's the problem. 99.9% of the time, the first time in a dungeon you're just tagging along with a bunch of other people who have slaughtered it a dozen times before.
But for that one brief, shining moment, D&D Online was the greatest game any of us had ever played.
Joined Eve Online in late November because of the free 14 day trial. Worked myself up into a light cruiser in about 1.5 months, which then got destroyed in a solo mission because the frame rate dropped to 1 frame per 3 seconds, and it is impossible without Commander Data skillz to activate your warp out quickly in such a scenario.
I had no problem risking an expensive ship like that, but I do have a problem when it is destroyed because of design flaws not related to gameplay. The game's been out what, 4 years now? And they haven't solved issues like this?
If you ask me, mainframes were more about I/O rates than raw number crunching in the processor. For every NASA-type application, there were a hundred large companies that needed payroll and bookkeeping operations.
The thing that's really killing the mainframe isn't the desktop's increased CPU power, but rather the desktop's cheaper, very fast I/O. Hence you no longer need the mainframe's specialized hardware pipelining everything from disc to RAM to register, with massive vector operands to boot.
A Trash-80 could run the calculations necessary to process paychecks for the whole US, or GM's parts inventory, in a reasonable amount of time if it could just get the data I/O fast enough.
> Larry Sessions, a columnist for Earth & Sky, has suggested in his blog that the gamma-ray > event whose radiation reached us a few hours before Arthur C. Clarke died, and which > occurred 7.5 billion years ago, be named the Clarke Event.
However, the discoverer of the burst quickly responded, saying "That's a nice thought, but I was planning on naming it the Anne Hathaway Event in hopes of getting some premium ass."
I forget what universe it is (don't think it's Rama) but there's a large tubular ship in space where you live on the inside. There is some kind of quantum singularity line extending down the central axis of the tube, which is infinitely long on the inside.
There is a city that hangs on the wire, and it can move back and forth by twisting its clamp. There are little portal doors along the inside walls that lead to different planets.
I loved the first stories, so I bought a book that was one of these "guest author visits the universe" set in that universe, but all the author did was travel down the tube, then dump off into one portal to tell his own story that had nothing to do with the main "unviverse".
For those who love the sordid details, this author had created his own evolutionary device, an Eco (I think), which was a single giant organism that actually grew into it's own entire ecology, complete with "plants" and "animals" that interacted in the normal way, but were really part of the same large organism.
God was that disappointing. Like buying a Trek book and the first thing the author does is dump you through a wormhole into his own non-Trek world.
Part of the thesis of the "big three" recently (Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris) is that it's precisely because the West, donning the religious version of "white man's guilt", insists on believing it has nothing to do with religion, and it is, nay, must be economic issues, political, societal, etc.
We've been so trained over the years to treat religion as a lifestyle choice, thanks to generations of separation of church and state, that we forget the rage and problems it causes when it is truly core to people's lives.
Clarke r00lz! Actually, I rather liked his newest 3001, the final sequal to the 2001 series.
How could they leave out the Coleco ADAM, the spin-off "expansion" to the Colecovision, the most popular post-Atari 2600 console to that time?
And, unlike most of these, the ADAM actually saw the light of day in production and sales. It's the software for it that was vaporware. Legion were the games promised and touted in newsletters, but very few actually saw the light of day.
You could even buy the CP/M operating system for it, which included a text editor and an assembler, should you wish to do programming in assembly language. Which was your only choice other than the built-in Basic.
But there were at least several dozen games promised (Tunnels and Trolls being one of the most promising) that never appeared, though I think the Dragon's Lair and the Smurf ADAM upgraded version both were released.
Slashdot Mirror
For the near-layman, this means you can represent numbers like 0.1 precisely. When 0.1 is converted into binary representation, there is no exact* representation.
With decimal representation, this is possible.
* finite, i.e. not infinitely long, like 0.777777...
I'm not your buddy, guy!
Hmmmm, 5 billion instructions per second divided by 186,000 miles per second * 5280 feet per mile * 12 inches per foot = 2.36 inches per instruction at the speed of light.
He should have said "width of your hand" instead. Mod -1 Poorly Chosen Analogy Due To Innumeracy
What's not funny:
> Climate Change Finally Impacts Important Industry
and
> Climate change to impact beer: scientist
What's not funny is nobody listens. In 20 years, when this doesn't happen (in the absence of government controls) because capitalism has risen to the occasion, will anybody remember?
Of course not.
Yet Australian beer will be cheaper and plentiful in Australia then, presuming the government doesn't put in price controls, or mandates on hops production, or some other BS.
But nobody listens.
Nobody cares.
Nobody remembers.
The amount used by drilling is vanishingly small compared to the total area. You, like many, suffer from innumeracy.
This isn't about oil, or finding oil, or producing oil, or protecting a few square miles. It's about power and touting BS to the masses that make them feel good as they live out their lives thousands of miles away in a concrete canyon.
I think it causes the blood vessels to expand, hence the drunk's bulbous nose. And if you're still out in the cold, expanding the capillaries on your skin is the last thing you want to do.
Does social retardation count as a disability for the purpose of deducting prostitution expenses from your taxes?
> is to marry that photorealism with software that can render images in
> real-time - defined as a refresh rate of 30 frames per second.
Ummmmm, my own experience is you need at least 60-70 fps to achieve the smoothness necessary to seem truly realistic.
The old Quake game showed this. Moving to the "Open GL-capable" cards (3dfx, PowerVR) gave a significant improvement in scene imagery, but the old software renderer generated super-fast frame rates on newer (for the time) machines that, while very blocky, were also like looking through a window rather than looking at a picture. A blocky world, but very smooth.
I know there's this "30 fps is enuf, that's all your eye can see the differences" meme floating around, but that's not counting the flickers at the edge of awareness, which, for me anyway, doesn't disappear until 60-70 fps.
And in any case, modern cards that can do better than that with, say, World of Warcraft, also suffer from the dynamic loading issues, where you start to move and more distant stuff starts being loaded into the card, causing a brief slowdown in framerates. This also busts the high fps realism.
WTF do you guys think he wants this realistic VR world so damned much?!?!?
> 'Graphics Turing Test': 'a computer can be considered intelligent if it
> can create an artificial world capable of fooling a person into believing
> it is the real thing.'
"Ahhh, you almost had me fooled! But I am a Slashdotter, and know that no chick who looks like Natalie Portman and Jessica Alba's love child would ever want to haul me into a bar bathroom and give me a hummer!"
> are brought for improper purposes of obtaining discovery, getting publicity, and intimidation
Ummm, that's what copyright is for, so the owners can go after the copyright violaters, including discovery, getting publicity (to discourage others), and intimidation (to discourage others.) Penalties are intimidation.
Now if you view it as a SLAPP- or Scientology-style attack, designed to intimidate by deliberately driving up costs, then you may have a point.
In some sci-fi I read a long time ago, they estimated a black hole would have to be about 1 cm in size before it would consume faster than it evaporated, if dropped into the Earth.
So you'd only have to worry about a black hole "eating" the Earth if it were about one centimeter in size. It's doubtful the LHC will create any such thing larger than a subatomic particle.
I assume the sci-fi was based on some numbers a real scientist ran somewhere.
Some kind of exotic, lower-energy matter is another story entirely though.
And is Blizzard supposed to throw away hundreds of thousands of man hours because someone wants to whip up a fake server to run with their client?
I'm not saying the logic of this particular trial is not iffy, but if there's no legal way for a company to make a client to only run with their server, you'll get fewer WoW type games in the future.
Where's all the similar-quality open-source client/server combos, with a hundred dungeons and lands and spells and so on, all fleshed out with nice and unique graphics?
"Why you, you unbathed, socially retarded, greens-wearing, overweight nerfed Horder!"
"WHOSE wearing greens?!?!?"
Here's a clue:
In Dungeon and Dragons Online, it suffered from the same problem -- people running the dungeons over and over again.
And over and over and over.
And over some more.
But once...just once...I got into a group and we went into a dungeon. "What do we do?" "I don't know." "I don't know, either." None of the five of us had done it before.
And it was light years more fun, exploring slowly, figuring out the puzzles.
That's the problem. 99.9% of the time, the first time in a dungeon you're just tagging along with a bunch of other people who have slaughtered it a dozen times before.
But for that one brief, shining moment, D&D Online was the greatest game any of us had ever played.
Joined Eve Online in late November because of the free 14 day trial. Worked myself up into a light cruiser in about 1.5 months, which then got destroyed in a solo mission because the frame rate dropped to 1 frame per 3 seconds, and it is impossible without Commander Data skillz to activate your warp out quickly in such a scenario.
I had no problem risking an expensive ship like that, but I do have a problem when it is destroyed because of design flaws not related to gameplay. The game's been out what, 4 years now? And they haven't solved issues like this?
20 minutes later I quit and haven't looked back.
If you develop Windows software without owning Windows, or an iPod case without owning an iPod, I would never want to buy your stuff, personally.
Apparently the book I was talking about was Legacy, also by Greg Bear, the 3rd in the series, though a prequel-ish thing.
:(
Ya, that was the dump that dumped you off into another portal world real quick-like
If you ask me, mainframes were more about I/O rates than raw number crunching in the processor. For every NASA-type application, there were a hundred large companies that needed payroll and bookkeeping operations.
The thing that's really killing the mainframe isn't the desktop's increased CPU power, but rather the desktop's cheaper, very fast I/O. Hence you no longer need the mainframe's specialized hardware pipelining everything from disc to RAM to register, with massive vector operands to boot.
A Trash-80 could run the calculations necessary to process paychecks for the whole US, or GM's parts inventory, in a reasonable amount of time if it could just get the data I/O fast enough.
> Larry Sessions, a columnist for Earth & Sky, has suggested in his blog that the gamma-ray
> event whose radiation reached us a few hours before Arthur C. Clarke died, and which
> occurred 7.5 billion years ago, be named the Clarke Event.
However, the discoverer of the burst quickly responded, saying "That's a nice thought, but I was planning on naming it the Anne Hathaway Event in hopes of getting some premium ass."
I forget what universe it is (don't think it's Rama) but there's a large tubular ship in space where you live on the inside. There is some kind of quantum singularity line extending down the central axis of the tube, which is infinitely long on the inside.
There is a city that hangs on the wire, and it can move back and forth by twisting its clamp. There are little portal doors along the inside walls that lead to different planets.
I loved the first stories, so I bought a book that was one of these "guest author visits the universe" set in that universe, but all the author did was travel down the tube, then dump off into one portal to tell his own story that had nothing to do with the main "unviverse".
For those who love the sordid details, this author had created his own evolutionary device, an Eco (I think), which was a single giant organism that actually grew into it's own entire ecology, complete with "plants" and "animals" that interacted in the normal way, but were really part of the same large organism.
God was that disappointing. Like buying a Trek book and the first thing the author does is dump you through a wormhole into his own non-Trek world.
Part of the thesis of the "big three" recently (Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris) is that it's precisely because the West, donning the religious version of "white man's guilt", insists on believing it has nothing to do with religion, and it is, nay, must be economic issues, political, societal, etc.
We've been so trained over the years to treat religion as a lifestyle choice, thanks to generations of separation of church and state, that we forget the rage and problems it causes when it is truly core to people's lives.
Clarke r00lz! Actually, I rather liked his newest 3001, the final sequal to the 2001 series.
> Researchers envision futuristic applications like those seen in Star Trek's holodeck.
:(
Yeah, I can see it now
"So, Jimmy. Do you like gladiator movies?"
> The TR10 technologies this time around are: cellulolytic enzymes, reality mining,
> connectomics, offline web apps, graphene transistors, atomic magnetometers, wireless
> power, nanoradio, probabilistic chips, modeling surprise.
No flesh clones of Sandra Bullock, with an AI brain programmed to love me, deeply and physically love me?
How could they leave out the Coleco ADAM, the spin-off "expansion" to the Colecovision, the most popular post-Atari 2600 console to that time?
And, unlike most of these, the ADAM actually saw the light of day in production and sales. It's the software for it that was vaporware. Legion were the games promised and touted in newsletters, but very few actually saw the light of day.
You could even buy the CP/M operating system for it, which included a text editor and an assembler, should you wish to do programming in assembly language. Which was your only choice other than the built-in Basic.
But there were at least several dozen games promised (Tunnels and Trolls being one of the most promising) that never appeared, though I think the Dragon's Lair and the Smurf ADAM upgraded version both were released.