Actually, Microsoft made a lot of effort trying to sell their software on other platforms too, up until a couple of years ago. Windows NT3.51 came in a version for x86, MIPS, sparc, Alpha and PowerPC. NT4.0 still comes in a version for the Alpha architecture, but is no longer supported. Microsoft ported their most popular apps, and gave complete compiler suites away for the Alpha architecture trying to get companies to support the Alpha-NT platform. Together with digital they _did_ write an emulator for Alpha-NT, that enabled you to run x86 binaries, with various degrees of success (some apps were faster, but most were slower than on the competing x86 machines, and stability suffered). To no avail, no one was interested. Not extremely surprising in retrospect.
You seem to forget that unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn't make PCs. They only make software. Because the design of PCs is not controlled by one company, but to a very large degree by the consumer ("Can I afford the hardware? Will I have to buy new software or can I use what I already have? Will I be able to keep using my old printer/soundcard/logo controlled lawnmower?"), no one can simply force the PC architecture to switch to a different processor.
Less Heat eliminates need for a processor cooling fan. eliminating the need for a fan makes the package smaller. see also #1.
If less heat also means no fans, i.e. low noise, and a neat small case that easily fits onto any desk, I'd seriously consider a Crusoe based desktop PC once the one I have now becomes obsolete.
A substance is only liquid (or solid or gaseous or any of the other states of matter) in a very narrow area on the temperature/pressure curve.
For example, if you take a planet made of water with an avarage surface temperature of 50 degrees celcius, the surface would still boil and evaporate near the equator, and be frozen solid near the poles, while at a certain depth below the surface, the pressure would make it solid etc.
It is not surprising that the gas giants are mostly made of lighter elements and molecules, as they are far more abundant in our solar system than heavier materials. A small gas ball would probably not have enought gravity to become a 'planet', and just exist in the form of a sparse gas cloud, eventually captured by larger concentrations of mass.
No need to blow the thing up... if you have resolved all the trajectories of earth orbit crossing asteroids, you will know many years in advance if and when it will hit the earth. All you have to do then is speed it up or slow it down a tiny fraction of a %. Over the course of billions of miles left to travel, this adds up to a huge change in the trajectory, at a potentially very low cost... If the object is small enough, simmply crashing a satelite into it could be enoug.. otherwise landing a probe on it's surface, with a small rocket engine to give it a gentle push could do the trick. Attaching a solar sail onto it was a similar, even cheaper solution proposed somewhere, but I don't remember where I read it.
Ofcourse in the case of a real dinosaur killer, a comet, we are screwed, because by the time you see it, it's going to hit in only a few months. (or a few million years if you can measure it's trajectory accurately enough to know it's not going to hit for another few of it's orbits)
I deliberately selected an obsolete model of a name brand PC (Siemens), to get quality rather than raw computing power this time, at a price I could afford.
So now I have a Celeron 300A based PC that turns out to be 100% reliable, and makes no noise. There is no processor fan; the only thing I hear is the HDD. Rather than be tempted by sexy clock cycles like with my last PC, I concluded that when a PC frustrates me by making me wait, it is nearly always loading something from disk, and rarely because the CPU is 100% busy, so I replaced the HDD with a 7200 rpm one.
Now if only I could find a silent PC keyboard. My neighbours complain they can hear the keys clicking if I leave my window open.
If you know where to look for it, you can find alpha based hardware at dump prices, just because they still bear the 'Digital' logo instead of Compaq. They're not state of the art anymore, but if you want one for private use that is hardly going to matter. (At least the processor in my PC is rarely less than 90% idle for extended periods of time, and unless you're a dedicated gamer harddisk speed is almost certainly your bottleneck, not CPU speed)
The image correction was added, according to NASA, because the blue diode also responded to infra red, thus making the blue signal stronger than it really was. This is not unheard of, it probably means that the second harmonic of the wavelength detected by the blue detector, which falls in the (infra)red part of the spectrum (twice the wavelength) also causes a blue signal. A similar process makes plants green. Plants absorb red light for photosynthesis, but the second harmonic of this wavelength (twice the frequency, or half the wavelength) is absorbed too, making plants white minus lots of red and some blue = green.
Forgot to mention that the maker of this site also claims to have spotted 4 martians on the pathfinder pictures, which NASA has hidden from us. If this guy isn't joking, he must be Fox Mulder:)
Sure, on the colour 'corrected' versions, the martian sky and landscape look very much more earthlike. However, the white parts of the spacecraft have suddenly turned blue. Furthermore I think NASA's scientific approach to processing the camera data is more convincing than the artistic approach the maker of this site takes. He just adjusted the colour balance until his intuition told him the picture looked 'right', while ofcourse human intuition has been calibrated for earth, and not for mars. I don't really see what NASA could possibly have to gain by a 'colour mars red' conspiracy, so I'll just file this site under X.
I only now realise that my brain could be used to translate websites between Dutch, English and German, and therefor almost certainly violates copyright laws in roughly the same way as the dialectiser(tm). Should I take my brain offline, until there is a certified way to make sure it can only translate sites I own? What could be the legal consequences if I fail to comply?
Unfortunately our relatively massive moon is also slowing down the earth's rotation. We may want to draw it a little closer to give our rotation a boost when the day/night cycle starts to become a little too long for comfort.
If MS were split, you would only have two microsofts. Especially if they are split into an OS and an apps division, in which case the two would never compete with each other either.
In my view the perfect solution would be one similar to what happened with intel. AMD now offers better quality than intel, giving intel an incentive to improve it's product, and Cyrix offers a product at a far lower price, giving intel an incentive to keep their prices down.
A similar solution would be to force MS to license windows to at least five competitors. If OEM vendors could choose between (for instance) MS windows, IBM windows, Oracle windows, Corel windows etc, all of thesee companies would have an incentive to offer the best possible windows at the lowest possible price, which would effectively remove the harm to consumers, which is the main reason for anti monopoly laws.
There is something mindless, lonely and arrogant about experiencing a tale, or wisdom from a book. Only knowlege gained by listening to storytellers has any meaning. And none of those city dwelling story tellers either! Real wilderness hermits they must be.
When do you think you will need a 128 bit address space? Have you considered how large a 64 bit one is? How much time would it take to search for an item in a database that is more than 17 million gigabytes long? Just a thought...
10000 obsolete chips may give the best price/performance ratio in floating point operations per dollar, but the original poster whats to do 'realtime, high end mathematical computations?'. The world 'realtime' is a bit confusing here.. does he want an embedded numbercruncher, or does he want a numbercruncher that's so fast it can simulate a certain process in real time? Assuming it's the latter, he'd have to plug those 10000 processors into some other hardware to make them work. Even if it were possible, it would be very difficult and expensive. Plus the fact that the overhead of the communication between all those nodes would seriously diminish performance.
I'm not sure if it is even nessesary to prove that the offending statement is false, only that it was written with the intention to harm someone. You could maliciously ruin someone's reputation without telling blatant lies. Does that make it right? In some cases maybe, in other cases not. In this case a court of law will apparently be deciding if this was ok or not. Completely seperate from the question if the offended professor has a case or not, after reading some of the comments on that page, it's not surprising that he was offended, and that he will do whatever he can to have those posts removed. Politely asking the webmaster to moderate the posts apparently had no effect, so what else could he do? In a perfect world freedom of speech includes the freedom to violate every law of courtesy and decency. If you live by this principle in the real world however, you'll find you make no friends, and get beaten up regularly.
he expansion of the universe is being slowed down (decelerated) by the gravitational attraction of the matter in it It is this point that has been contested by recent findings that suggest the expansion of the universe is actually accellerating rather than decellerating. This makes the universe older than it would have been with a decellerating expansion rate. I believe the explanation given for this was 'the pressure exeryted by quantum fluctuations', causing the vacuum of deep space to have a pressure, or something line that.
Not really. I cant remember where I read it, but recently it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down, but accellerating. This already redefined the age of the universe to about 15 billion years, solving the mystery of objects older than the universe
What a rediculous, and particularily nasty bit of flamebait... ...or is this a clever troll intended to demonstrate how OJ got off? "The policemen who arrested him were racists, so if you find him guilty, that makes you a racist too. It doesnt matter if he's guilty or not, we have to punish the racist police by finding OJ not guilty". All these arguments weighed heavily enough in the mind of the jury to find the small, but non-zero chance that the overwhealming forensic evidence was the result of an elaborate conspiracy to rob the black community of one of it's icons, ground for reasonable doubt.
Really? If the lawyer is convincing enough, the jury will find a 1 in 37 million chance 'reasonable doubt', especially after this incident. Forensic evidence doesn't mean a whole lot to a jury that cosists of people who only get to be involved in a trial once in their life (if they're lucky). Remember how easily the overwhealming forensic evidence was brushed aside in the O.J. Simpson case?
Maybe it's not the right tool for audiophiles, but I can think of a use for in the studio: you may want to transfer the music on a very old collectable record to CD, perhaps to re-release it, but the original tapes are no longer available, or in a dismal state. In that case this gadget may give a slightly better quality copy than an ordinary record player...
When I was younger, and even less enlightened than I am now, I used to think girls didn't like computers because they were something new, and girls just didn't like new things, and that they would grow to like computers too when those things stopped being something new.
How wrong could I be. Now that theres a computer on every desk and in every home, and in every car, park, ocean, mudpool, glacier and soon in every internal organ, girls still don't like computers, and most wouldn't dream of using one for any purpose other than as a tool. Most of them seem to prefer playing with people, and consider playing computer games about as interesting as playing with a hammer or another tool.
I wonder if this difference is culturally defined, or engraved in the human genome. In our particular culture the female 'cool' requires women not to be interested in exact sciences, so woment make up no more than about 10% of all chemistry or physics students, and I'm told women are even rarer at mathmatics and computer science. However, in other cultures I'm told, where science has a higher status, or where it is considered equally uncool for men to be interested in science, the gender difference is much smaller, or even reversed (France, Latin America). I wonder if girls there do like to play with computers. -----
Nothing Obsolete about 'geck'
on
Geeks vs. Nerds
·
· Score: 1
Geek, on the other hand, has its roots in a now-obsolete Dutch word, "geck," which meant "fool." There is nothing obsolete about the Dutch word "gek", it's just spelled without a c nowadays. I use it every day. It's meaning is closer to "insane" than "fool", because it can apply to objects or situations as well as people. -----
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Microsoft made a lot of effort trying to sell their software on other platforms too, up until a couple of years ago.
Windows NT3.51 came in a version for x86, MIPS, sparc, Alpha and PowerPC. NT4.0 still comes in a version for the Alpha architecture, but is no longer supported.
Microsoft ported their most popular apps, and gave complete compiler suites away for the Alpha architecture trying to get companies to support the Alpha-NT platform. Together with digital they _did_ write an emulator for Alpha-NT, that enabled you to run x86 binaries, with various degrees of success (some apps were faster, but most were slower than on the competing x86 machines, and stability suffered).
To no avail, no one was interested. Not extremely surprising in retrospect.
You seem to forget that unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn't make PCs. They only make software. Because the design of PCs is not controlled by one company, but to a very large degree by the consumer ("Can I afford the hardware? Will I have to buy new software or can I use what I already have? Will I be able to keep using my old printer/soundcard/logo controlled lawnmower?"), no one can simply force the PC architecture to switch to a different processor.
Less Heat eliminates need for a processor cooling fan. eliminating the need for a fan makes the package smaller. see also #1.
If less heat also means no fans, i.e. low noise, and a neat small case that easily fits onto any desk, I'd seriously consider a Crusoe based desktop PC once the one I have now becomes obsolete.
A substance is only liquid (or solid or gaseous or any of the other states of matter) in a very narrow area on the temperature/pressure curve.
For example, if you take a planet made of water with an avarage surface temperature of 50 degrees celcius, the surface would still boil and evaporate near the equator, and be frozen solid near the poles, while at a certain depth below the surface, the pressure would make it solid etc.
It is not surprising that the gas giants are mostly made of lighter elements and molecules, as they are far more abundant in our solar system than heavier materials.
A small gas ball would probably not have enought gravity to become a 'planet', and just exist in the form of a sparse gas cloud, eventually captured by larger concentrations of mass.
No need to blow the thing up... if you have resolved all the trajectories of earth orbit crossing asteroids, you will know many years in advance if and when it will hit the earth. All you have to do then is speed it up or slow it down a tiny fraction of a %. Over the course of billions of miles left to travel, this adds up to a huge change in the trajectory, at a potentially very low cost...
If the object is small enough, simmply crashing a satelite into it could be enoug.. otherwise landing a probe on it's surface, with a small rocket engine to give it a gentle push could do the trick. Attaching a solar sail onto it was a similar, even cheaper solution proposed somewhere, but I don't remember where I read it.
Ofcourse in the case of a real dinosaur killer, a comet, we are screwed, because by the time you see it, it's going to hit in only a few months. (or a few million years if you can measure it's trajectory accurately enough to know it's not going to hit for another few of it's orbits)
They are a name brand in consumer electronics
I deliberately selected an obsolete model of a name brand PC (Siemens), to get quality rather than raw computing power this time, at a price I could afford.
So now I have a Celeron 300A based PC that turns out to be 100% reliable, and makes no noise. There is no processor fan; the only thing I hear is the HDD. Rather than be tempted by sexy clock cycles like with my last PC, I concluded that when a PC frustrates me by making me wait, it is nearly always loading something from disk, and rarely because the CPU is 100% busy, so I replaced the HDD with a 7200 rpm one.
Now if only I could find a silent PC keyboard. My neighbours complain they can hear the keys clicking if I leave my window open.
If you know where to look for it, you can find alpha based hardware at dump prices, just because they still bear the 'Digital' logo instead of Compaq.
They're not state of the art anymore, but if you want one for private use that is hardly going to matter. (At least the processor in my PC is rarely less than 90% idle for extended periods of time, and unless you're a dedicated gamer harddisk speed is almost certainly your bottleneck, not CPU speed)
The image correction was added, according to NASA, because the blue diode also responded to infra red, thus making the blue signal stronger than it really was.
This is not unheard of, it probably means that the second harmonic of the wavelength detected by the blue detector, which falls in the (infra)red part of the spectrum (twice the wavelength) also causes a blue signal.
A similar process makes plants green. Plants absorb red light for photosynthesis, but the second harmonic of this wavelength (twice the frequency, or half the wavelength) is absorbed too, making plants white minus lots of red and some blue = green.
Forgot to mention that the maker of this site also claims to have spotted 4 martians on the pathfinder pictures, which NASA has hidden from us. If this guy isn't joking, he must be Fox Mulder :)
Sure, on the colour 'corrected' versions, the martian sky and landscape look very much more earthlike. However, the white parts of the spacecraft have suddenly turned blue. Furthermore I think NASA's scientific approach to processing the camera data is more convincing than the artistic approach the maker of this site takes. He just adjusted the colour balance until his intuition told him the picture looked 'right', while ofcourse human intuition has been calibrated for earth, and not for mars.
I don't really see what NASA could possibly have to gain by a 'colour mars red' conspiracy, so I'll just file this site under X.
I only now realise that my brain could be used to translate websites between Dutch, English and German, and therefor almost certainly violates copyright laws in roughly the same way as the dialectiser(tm).
Should I take my brain offline, until there is a certified way to make sure it can only translate sites I own? What could be the legal consequences if I fail to comply?
Unfortunately our relatively massive moon is also slowing down the earth's rotation. We may want to draw it a little closer to give our rotation a boost when the day/night cycle starts to become a little too long for comfort.
If MS were split, you would only have two microsofts. Especially if they are split into an OS and an apps division, in which case the two would never compete with each other either.
In my view the perfect solution would be one similar to what happened with intel. AMD now offers better quality than intel, giving intel an incentive to improve it's product, and Cyrix offers a product at a far lower price, giving intel an incentive to keep their prices down.
A similar solution would be to force MS to license windows to at least five competitors. If OEM vendors could choose between (for instance) MS windows, IBM windows, Oracle windows, Corel windows etc, all of thesee companies would have an incentive to offer the best possible windows at the lowest possible price, which would effectively remove the harm to consumers, which is the main reason for anti monopoly laws.
There is something mindless, lonely and arrogant about experiencing a tale, or wisdom from a book. Only knowlege gained by listening to storytellers has any meaning. And none of those city dwelling story tellers either! Real wilderness hermits they must be.
Searching a 64 bit address space takes twice as long as searching a 32 bit one.
are you sure it's not 2^32 times as long?
When do you think you will need a 128 bit address space? Have you considered how large a 64 bit one is? How much time would it take to search for an item in a database that is more than 17 million gigabytes long? Just a thought...
10000 obsolete chips may give the best price/performance ratio in floating point operations per dollar, but the original poster whats to do 'realtime, high end mathematical computations?'. The world 'realtime' is a bit confusing here.. does he want an embedded numbercruncher, or does he want a numbercruncher that's so fast it can simulate a certain process in real time?
Assuming it's the latter, he'd have to plug those 10000 processors into some other hardware to make them work. Even if it were possible, it would be very difficult and expensive. Plus the fact that the overhead of the communication between all those nodes would seriously diminish performance.
I'm not sure if it is even nessesary to prove that the offending statement is false, only that it was written with the intention to harm someone.
You could maliciously ruin someone's reputation without telling blatant lies. Does that make it right? In some cases maybe, in other cases not. In this case a court of law will apparently be deciding if this was ok or not.
Completely seperate from the question if the offended professor has a case or not, after reading some of the comments on that page, it's not surprising that he was offended, and that he will do whatever he can to have those posts removed. Politely asking the webmaster to moderate the posts apparently had no effect, so what else could he do? In a perfect world freedom of speech includes the freedom to violate every law of courtesy and decency. If you live by this principle in the real world however, you'll find you make no friends, and get beaten up regularly.
he expansion of the universe is being slowed down (decelerated) by the gravitational attraction of the matter in it
It is this point that has been contested by recent findings that suggest the expansion of the universe is actually accellerating rather than decellerating. This makes the universe older than it would have been with a decellerating expansion rate. I believe the explanation given for this was 'the pressure exeryted by quantum fluctuations', causing the vacuum of deep space to have a pressure, or something line that.
Not really. I cant remember where I read it, but recently it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down, but accellerating. This already redefined the age of the universe to about 15 billion years, solving the mystery of objects older than the universe
What a rediculous, and particularily nasty bit of flamebait...
...or is this a clever troll intended to demonstrate how OJ got off? "The policemen who arrested him were racists, so if you find him guilty, that makes you a racist too. It doesnt matter if he's guilty or not, we have to punish the racist police by finding OJ not guilty". All these arguments weighed heavily enough in the mind of the jury to find the small, but non-zero chance that the overwhealming forensic evidence was the result of an elaborate conspiracy to rob the black community of one of it's icons, ground for reasonable doubt.
Really? If the lawyer is convincing enough, the jury will find a 1 in 37 million chance 'reasonable doubt', especially after this incident. Forensic evidence doesn't mean a whole lot to a jury that cosists of people who only get to be involved in a trial once in their life (if they're lucky). Remember how easily the overwhealming forensic evidence was brushed aside in the O.J. Simpson case?
Maybe it's not the right tool for audiophiles, but I can think of a use for in the studio: you may want to transfer the music on a very old collectable record to CD, perhaps to re-release it, but the original tapes are no longer available, or in a dismal state. In that case this gadget may give a slightly better quality copy than an ordinary record player...
When I was younger, and even less enlightened than I am now, I used to think girls didn't like computers because they were something new, and girls just didn't like new things, and that they would grow to like computers too when those things stopped being something new.
How wrong could I be. Now that theres a computer on every desk and in every home, and in every car, park, ocean, mudpool, glacier and soon in every internal organ, girls still don't like computers, and most wouldn't dream of using one for any purpose other than as a tool. Most of them seem to prefer playing with people, and consider playing computer games about as interesting as playing with a hammer or another tool.
I wonder if this difference is culturally defined, or engraved in the human genome. In our particular culture the female 'cool' requires women not to be interested in exact sciences, so woment make up no more than about 10% of all chemistry or physics students, and I'm told women are even rarer at mathmatics and computer science. However, in other cultures I'm told, where science has a higher status, or where it is considered equally uncool for men to be interested in science, the gender difference is much smaller, or even reversed (France, Latin America). I wonder if girls there do like to play with computers.
-----
Geek, on the other hand, has its roots in a now-obsolete Dutch word, "geck," which meant "fool."
There is nothing obsolete about the Dutch word "gek", it's just spelled without a c nowadays. I use it every day. It's meaning is closer to "insane" than "fool", because it can apply to objects or situations as well as people.
-----