to my mind. It's a science fiction book set out in the near future where people use personal gear to operate in a virtual reality that is globally connected. The spatial web seems to have many similarities to it. A good read, I recommend!
Sadly, if these was implemented, it would probably be an inconvenience for many people. Heck, let's do the same for people traveling from US to Europe. Maybe symmetric action on this matter will open more eyes. Actually, we could do much more. We could put up a farce of unuseful landing checkings for everyone from US. Certainly it will do both sides harm, but at least it's fair;)
It's a researched fact that more than 60-80 characters per line is unreadable. And that is the reason the number of columns is limited. Long lines just are unreadable. One can have as many rows as one wants on the terminal, but wide terminals encourage too wide (unreadable) coding styles.
Look what Donald Knuth did with LaTeX. It's not a coincidence that the default "article" style has large margins.
> Both ID and evolution are theories, or they wouldn't have the words "The > theory of" before them. No, ID is not even a hypothesis. Anyone can claim that phenomena X is not causality of Y but some inexplicable power. A hypothesis can only be something that is verifiable by empirical evidence, and it must be something that can possibly be shown wrong, at least to some degree. ID can not ever be shown to be false, because it's religion, so it can not become a hypothesis.
I have 5 very strong objections against Microsoft:
1. Unlawful monopolistic practices have led to a situation where it is hard to buy a laptop without Windows licence (for running other OSes)
2. Their technology is simply bad in all respects except C#.
The operating system has thousands of seemingly random places of configuration files, many of which are not understandable by text editor inspection.
The C programming API lacks definite power of UNIX filesystems/names (how many times have you seen a notice that says a file is reserved by some application?), that is, good separation of dentries and inodes.
The rest of the Win32 API is mostly random chunk that is hard or inconvenient to use. See
Ironically a more advanced API (the NP API) was instroduced with the NT, but it was left undocumented by Microsoft and thus it is not used for applications.
Furthermore, their technology is FULL of hacks and workarounds, but the main reason for bugginess of their system is BAD design and implementation.
3. They hostile towards operating systems by obfuscating and hiding their file formats and protocols. Think of Windows file and print services, Windows Media, Microsoft Word,... Interoperatibility is MOST important for successful use of technology because without that it becomes very hard to build more sophisticated systems that require components from various parties.
4. They are hostile towards technology improvement. Windows OS (but mostly applications) is practically useful with only x86 line processors, which slows down development of microprocessors. Windows is not even a good OS to take advantage of x86-64, let alone Itanium that they dumped. Fortunately, F/OSS operating systems made it possible to test and use those better processors with real applications from very early development to this day.
Also, the OS is a mess because they have REFUSED to fix it; the main drive has been money through gradual backwards compatible changes that has added to the mess.
5. The Windows culture is hostile towards maintainable systems. Where is the package management system that would be so desperately needed by ALL users of Windows? It would be simple to create a distributed package management system like apt in Debian, which would ease updates and installing software for all parties. Having a package management system would not even require Microsoft, but why hasn't Microsoft done it? Do they just hate convenience, or why is their update system such useless?
Summary: All in all, Microsoft has been harmful to all parties surrounding their operating system: the hardware and software people, consumers, users and administrators.
PS. sorry for "gain saying", it would take hours and hours to write comprehensive explanations of these points.
> The idea of stiffer penalties for DoS attacks are probably something we > can all get behind, but the language of the law is frustratingly vague."
Speak for yourself, I disagree. No material damage or health loss happens so 5 years is unreasonable. It doesn't cause any lasting damage for the victim, but the loss should of course be compensated.
As far as the PS3 is concerned for f@h I would be concerned about overheating if you're running it like that for long periods of time. It's already been a problem to some extent for the xbox 360 and the cell processor is even more powerful.
I don't know specifics of PS3 heating, but the approach they took in PS3 to use many SPUs which are simple multi-issue SIMD DSPs is actually a "low power" approach for great performance. Irony.
If a GPU can be so effective, seems like they might be better off building a cluster of ATI powered pc's and running the calculations in-house. I bet that's a lot cheaper than a supercomputer.
Maybe ATI bought them a real supercomputer for this nice advertisement:-)
Are ASICs really that much better than general-purpose circuits?
These days high-end graphics cards are multiprocessor DSP systems. That they're also ASICs is too general to be informative here. Those DSPs are programmable like the general-purpose processors, but they wouldn't be as efficient in normal programs. However, in certain types of programs they're very fast due to their simplified memory architecture, pipelining etc. I think it would be more accurate to ask:
"Are multiprocessor DSP systems really that much better than general-purpose multiprocessors systems?"
Usually the speed comes with the loss of programmability. Programs for those DSPs have to be designed with message-passing, tight threading and memory efficiency in mind, so it won't be easy to take advantage of the potential. It's interesting to see how far this will go.
Probably so. I wanted to point out a general problem on IT field rather than comment on this specific case (as there weren't many technical details about the case).
Get a new job then. If using Windows is more important than what you want to accomplish then maybe the job is too badly managed. It annoys me that many organisations place restrictions on technical solutions that the employee could make oneself; For example, it would be demotivating for me to be ordered to work with IE instead of Firefox (or Windows instead of UNIX:-) Not all employees are sheeps that have to be micromanaged. Some people are more than capable of making techical decisions without admins or technical support.
I don't understand what the issue is -- if Siemens or Airbus or Glaxo gets into some regulatory issue in the US, you think their countries' embassies don't try to pull a few strings?
Bad behavior shouldn't be justified by others behaving badly. Anyway, I don't know if those embassies would intervene, but the embassies shouldn't do it unless the companies were treated unfairly according to US laws. In this case, outside government interference tries to bend EU laws, which would make Microsoft a company that need not obey laws.
generating about 120 megawatts of electricity per day
Watt means power (J/s) so it's wrong to say that it generates x watts per day. Instead, one can just say that it generates 120 megawatts of electricity. In one day, it will generate x*24*3600s joules of energy.
What makes you think that companies think in short term profits?
It's easier to predict near rather than far.
And what makes you think that government thinks in the long term?
Actually quite a few things. Especially education has a very long term effect that improves health and well-being. In research governments often fund core research that wouldn't otherwise be funded. In construction, think of railroads, not many investors are encouraged to get money back in 30 years.
I have never seen a politician who thinks farther than the next election
I'm sorry for your country, but I'm sure there are some long-term thinking politicians there. In sane countries politicians do not decide what is the appropriate research field that needs to be funded, they just decide how much is the research budget;)
There is much more incentive for long term planning in the private sector than in government.
And yet quartal policies play so much role in USA. That long-term thinking is more rare than you think.
Also, what makes you think that stem cell research doesn't have immediate potential for profit? It is being used to produce working treatments RIGHT NOW. It is going to make a lot of money, very soon (provided it stays legal).
Hmm, obviously, with these stem cells, they would be researching something that is still unknown, possibly taking a long time. Companies like shortcuts in research, but there needs to be a comprehensive base too.
Your whole point is based on a set of confused assumptions.
Well, not on your idealistic free-market assumptions, sorry:) I have very different view on economics because I live here in Finland/Europe, where government does lots of long-term thinking (not saying US government doesn't, although you said it).
Demonizing the opposition to embryonic stem cell research as "theocratic" is neither accurate nor constructive - there are even atheists who have ethical issues with the use of embryonic stem cells in research programs.
You have reversed the cause for this discussion, which is that people who oppose the research started demonising it. Atheists certainly have more degrees of freedom in their ethics, but it seems to be rare to oppose this research for other than religious reasons (note: I am an atheist/agnostic)
however i dont want my government spending money on damn near anything, we dont have the cash to spend anymore, bush spends more than the democrats do,
Is it better to use the money for war then? If a fraction of the war budget was put to safety and health research, many more lives were saved and health would improve than spending it for Iraq. For example, I'm sure one milliard for safe-driving education (mandatory) would save quite a few lives annually. At least the intense driving education in scandinavia helps in death statistics.
If 95% of the California population want to fund stem cell research for embryos, then let California. If 95% of Alabama's population thinks it is wrong and immoral, then they won't have to.
What good thinking. In the same process, let all coast people not pay taxes for building roads and railways to inland. The point is, long term research is best supported by tax money because companies mostly seek short-term profits. But anyway, this article is not about science budgets.
More than 424 people have been reported killed in Lebanon and Israel since fighting broke out July 12.
It would be more fair to say that 9/10 of the killed were from Lebanon. The bias of USA media in middle-east affairs amazes me often. (I'm from Finland/Europe)
> It is my sincere hope that BT starts charging on a per-bandwidth basis so guys like you can't hog it all.
There's plenty of local bandwidth available so it makes to use most of it. Current p2p systems, which make up the most traffic in internet, tend to favor the fastest peer, which will statistically be someone near you. Also, billing for used bits can cause economic surprises for people and make true internet based computing harder because there has to be some kind of limits for bw usage. It is easier for the ISP to QoS down people causing much traffic, but not much point in cutting them entirely off (because they won't be customers after that).
At least here in.fi, all common ADSL lines are unlimited bw services. The operator may QoS people down, though. But I haven't heard that it has happened to any of my bandwidth-hogging friends =) If I wanted to be somewhere, it would be.se, because they have regional 10/100 Mbit unfiltered links (bredbandsbolaget) to home customers.
My line has been maxed out for a week now, keep those lines busy and make those ISPs compete.
Slashdot Mirror
Please merge with me! git pull https://github.com/nportman/dna
This article brings Vernor Vinge's
Rainbows End
to my mind. It's a science fiction book set out in the near future where people use personal gear to operate in a virtual reality that is globally connected. The spatial web seems to have many similarities to it. A good read, I recommend!
> Made by Microsoft ? :)
No, it wouldn't hit one single target.. This hit at least 9 targets..
Sadly, if these was implemented, it would probably be an inconvenience for many people. Heck, let's do the same for people traveling from US to Europe. Maybe symmetric action on this matter will open more eyes. Actually, we could do much more. We could put up a farce of unuseful landing checkings for everyone from US. Certainly it will do both sides harm, but at least it's fair ;)
It's a researched fact that more than 60-80 characters per line is unreadable. And that is the reason the number of columns is limited. Long lines just are unreadable.
One can have as many rows as one wants on the terminal, but wide terminals encourage too wide (unreadable) coding styles.
Look what Donald Knuth did with LaTeX. It's not a coincidence that the default "article" style has large margins.
As far as I know, B.G. and L.T. are not freethinkers. However, I don't think they're religious either.
PS. I'm against ID and all that religious bullshit
> Both ID and evolution are theories, or they wouldn't have the words "The
> theory of" before them.
No, ID is not even a hypothesis. Anyone can claim that phenomena X is not causality of Y but some inexplicable power. A hypothesis can only be something that is verifiable by empirical evidence, and it must be something that can possibly be shown wrong, at least to some degree. ID can not ever be shown to be false, because it's religion, so it can not become a hypothesis.
I have 5 very strong objections against Microsoft:
t ml
... Interoperatibility is MOST important for successful use of technology because without that it becomes very hard to build more sophisticated systems that require components from various parties.
1. Unlawful monopolistic practices have led to a situation where it is hard to buy a laptop without Windows licence (for running other OSes)
2. Their technology is simply bad in all respects except C#.
The operating system has thousands of seemingly random places of configuration files, many of which are not understandable by text editor inspection.
The C programming API lacks definite power of UNIX filesystems/names (how many times have you seen a notice that says a file is reserved by some application?), that is, good separation of dentries and inodes.
The rest of the Win32 API is mostly random chunk that is hard or inconvenient to use. See
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/spinellis97critique.h
Ironically a more advanced API (the NP API) was instroduced with the NT, but it was left undocumented by Microsoft and thus it is not used for applications.
Furthermore, their technology is FULL of hacks and workarounds, but the main reason for bugginess of their system is BAD design and implementation.
3. They hostile towards operating systems by obfuscating and hiding their file formats and protocols. Think of Windows file and print services, Windows Media, Microsoft Word,
4. They are hostile towards technology improvement. Windows OS (but mostly applications) is practically useful with only x86 line processors, which slows down development of microprocessors. Windows is not even a good OS to take advantage of x86-64, let alone Itanium that they dumped. Fortunately, F/OSS operating systems made it possible to test and use those better processors with real applications from very early development to this day.
Also, the OS is a mess because they have REFUSED to fix it; the main drive has been money through gradual backwards compatible changes that has added to the mess.
5. The Windows culture is hostile towards maintainable systems. Where is the package management system that would be so desperately needed by ALL users of Windows? It would be simple to create a distributed package management system like apt in Debian, which would ease updates and installing software for all parties. Having a package management system would not even require Microsoft, but why hasn't Microsoft done it? Do they just hate convenience, or why is their update system such useless?
Summary: All in all, Microsoft has been harmful to all parties surrounding their operating system: the hardware and software people, consumers, users and administrators.
PS. sorry for "gain saying", it would take hours and hours to write comprehensive explanations of these points.
Filling atmosphere with something.. hmmm.. Why does this bring "Mad Scientist" into my mind?-)
> The idea of stiffer penalties for DoS attacks are probably something we
> can all get behind, but the language of the law is frustratingly vague."
Speak for yourself, I disagree. No material damage or health loss happens so 5 years is unreasonable. It doesn't cause any lasting damage for the victim, but the loss should of course be compensated.
If you care so much about numbers, start using SI units, please.
I don't know specifics of PS3 heating, but the approach they took in PS3 to use many SPUs which are simple multi-issue SIMD DSPs is actually a "low power" approach for great performance. Irony.
Maybe ATI bought them a real supercomputer for this nice advertisement:-)
These days high-end graphics cards are multiprocessor DSP systems. That they're also ASICs is too general to be informative here. Those DSPs are programmable like the general-purpose processors, but they wouldn't be as efficient in normal programs. However, in certain types of programs they're very fast due to their simplified memory architecture, pipelining etc. I think it would be more accurate to ask:
"Are multiprocessor DSP systems really that much better than general-purpose multiprocessors systems?"
Usually the speed comes with the loss of programmability. Programs for those DSPs have to be designed with message-passing, tight threading and memory efficiency in mind, so it won't be easy to take advantage of the potential. It's interesting to see how far this will go.
Probably so. I wanted to point out a general problem on IT field rather than comment on this specific case (as there weren't many technical details about the case).
Get a new job then. If using Windows is more important than what you want to accomplish then maybe the job is too badly managed. It annoys me that many organisations place restrictions on technical solutions that the employee could make oneself; For example, it would be demotivating for me to be ordered to work with IE instead of Firefox (or Windows instead of UNIX :-) Not all employees are sheeps that have to be micromanaged. Some people are more than capable of making techical decisions without admins or technical support.
Bad behavior shouldn't be justified by others behaving badly. Anyway, I don't know if those embassies would intervene, but the embassies shouldn't do it unless the companies were treated unfairly according to US laws. In this case, outside government interference tries to bend EU laws, which would make Microsoft a company that need not obey laws.
It would mean to increase power output by 120 megawatts each day. Pretty soon it would produce huge amounts of energy in a day
Watt means power (J/s) so it's wrong to say that it generates x watts per day. Instead, one can just say that it generates 120 megawatts of electricity. In one day, it will generate x*24*3600s joules of energy.
It's easier to predict near rather than far.
Actually quite a few things. Especially education has a very long term effect that improves health and well-being. In research governments often fund core research that wouldn't otherwise be funded. In construction, think of railroads, not many investors are encouraged to get money back in 30 years.
I'm sorry for your country, but I'm sure there are some long-term thinking politicians there. In sane countries politicians do not decide what is the appropriate research field that needs to be funded, they just decide how much is the research budget
And yet quartal policies play so much role in USA. That long-term thinking is more rare than you think.
Hmm, obviously, with these stem cells, they would be researching something that is still unknown, possibly taking a long time. Companies like shortcuts in research, but there needs to be a comprehensive base too.
Well, not on your idealistic free-market assumptions, sorry
You have reversed the cause for this discussion, which is that people who oppose the research started demonising it. Atheists certainly have more degrees of freedom in their ethics, but it seems to be rare to oppose this research for other than religious reasons (note: I am an atheist/agnostic)
Is it better to use the money for war then? If a fraction of the war budget was put to safety and health research, many more lives were saved and health would improve than spending it for Iraq. For example, I'm sure one milliard for safe-driving education (mandatory) would save quite a few lives annually. At least the intense driving education in scandinavia helps in death statistics.
What good thinking. In the same process, let all coast people not pay taxes for building roads and railways to inland. The point is, long term research is best supported by tax money because companies mostly seek short-term profits. But anyway, this article is not about science budgets.
It would be more fair to say that 9/10 of the killed were from Lebanon. The bias of USA media in middle-east affairs amazes me often. (I'm from Finland/Europe)
> It is my sincere hope that BT starts charging on a per-bandwidth basis so guys like you can't hog it all.
.fi, all common ADSL lines are unlimited bw services. The operator may QoS people down, though. But I haven't heard that it has happened to any of my bandwidth-hogging friends =) If I wanted to be somewhere, it would be .se, because they have regional 10/100 Mbit unfiltered links (bredbandsbolaget) to home customers.
There's plenty of local bandwidth available so it makes to use most of it. Current p2p systems, which make up the most traffic in internet, tend to favor the fastest peer, which will statistically be someone near you. Also, billing for used bits can cause economic surprises for people and make true internet based computing harder because there has to be some kind of limits for bw usage. It is easier for the ISP to QoS down people causing much traffic, but not much point in cutting them entirely off (because they won't be customers after that).
At least here in
My line has been maxed out for a week now, keep those lines busy and make those ISPs compete.