Would that be less difficult than sending more solar cells?
Almost certainly. The energy density of nuclear fuel is ridiculously high. Photovoltaic panels just can't compete with that, unless some scientists pull a miracle out of their hats.
It's silly to worry about sending nuclear waste into space because it's not going to happen. Sticking it in the ground is orders of magnitude cheaper, and then we can dig it up later to recycle it.
The GP post was kind of confusingly phrased, wasn't it.
You haven't heard? I know some creationists who say that the Genesis story is literally true, but when it said "day" it meant thousands of years, because some verse in the Bible says that God has trouble with our puny human units of time or something. They're called "day-age creationists", and they apparently think the earth was created long before the sun.
Let's assume for a moment that the leaders of both parties are identical clones of each other. The Democrats would still have to be more war-averse, because otherwise they would alienate their base. They might not fight very hard to keep us out of wars, but I doubt that they'll try very hard to get us into any wars either. That's more than I can say about the Republicans, who have to play to a more hawkish base.
Fat chance getting GOOD open-source drivers in a timely fashion (as in, before the hardware is 2-3 generations behind), unless Intel writes them.
That's the point. Intel writes open source Linux drivers for their graphics hardware. They've done so for a while now. I find closed source graphics drivers to be a headache, so if Intel is getting into the high-end market, that's a hopeful sign. What are you complaining about?
And to bring this back on topic: the VM in the article can (or will soon) look at what the types of x, y, and z usually are and then guess. It can generate optimized code on the assumption that x and y are (for example) floats. Just throw in a check to execute a more general version of the code if that assumption is wrong, and you're good to go. Thanks to the way CPUs work, the overhead of checking should be negligible.
I don't know why people say that any interpreted/JITed/VMed/etc. program can be as fast (or faster! The audacity!) than C code. Whatever tricks and shortcuts your favorite language's interpreter/whatever is taking, can also be exploited in a C program by any decent programmer (absolutely all of them if you count using a bit of inline assembly to still be C.)
Some optimization information is not available at compile-time. If you can identify the common case, you can make it fast -- and sometimes the common case changes over time, so the only way to measure it is at runtime. Adaptive optimization can do cool things like better inlining, re-ordering branches, all sorts of fun stuff.
You seem to like C++, so let me pick an example familiar to people who fret about C++ speed: virtual method calls. C++ has to use a vtable at runtime when you call a virtual method, so that can be slow. But if you had a pretty good idea of what method that virtual call is probably going to call, then you can just assume that that's what will happen. You can inline this common case, and just insert some code to check if you're wrong at runtime. It's like branch prediction in the CPU: if you guess wrong, then you pay a price. But most of the time you won't guess wrong.
I'm sure you can take advantage of this in C/C++, but only in a very theoretical sense of the word "can".
What's interesting is that the Bible has survived 2000+ yrs not because it was written on "nickel..." disc, but because it is something of value that was passed from generation to generation. My guess is that this disc won't last ten years because the content is not valuable/meaningful to anyone. It will simply be forgotten.
There are two problems with this approach to preserving records of current languages:
1. Can you guarantee that people will continue to care? Christianity won the lottery and became a major religion, unlike all the other middle eastern sects around that time. Societies change.
2. Not that many people care now. I mean, honestly, if you went up to ten people on the street and asked them if they really cared about preserving a record of our current languages for thousands of years, you probably wouldn't get many enthusiastic "hell yes" answers.
When you've got this kind of publicity shitstorm going, you don't need to grovel to the FTC. I actually hear about this from random people in real life; it's that big.
Taste. If you look at most of the web today, it's a lot more tasteful and usable than it was a few years ago. Myspace is a big anachronism in this respect.
I use Myspace by staying the hell away from it and not having an account. It keeps a bunch of dumbasses from polluting the rest of the internet with their garbage, and for that I thank it.
The lesson here is: when repeating variants of jokes that were tired and old years ago, make sure that they aren't based on ridiculous premises.
Would you like to hear my Prohibition jokes? They're so timely and relevant!
Indeed, IIRC Freescale is developing some microcontrollers with Flash and MRAM onboard. One nice thing about this is that Flash writes can take a while, due to the way Flash memory is laid out on the chip, but MRAM should be quite a bit faster.
*sigh*, fuck me apparently. Here's the Weird Al quote with non-broken formatting, a fan's question in bold and Al's reply in italics:
Tim Sloane of Ijamsville, MD asks: Al, which of these purchasing methods should I use in order to make sure the most profit gets to you: Buying one of your albums on CD, or buying one of your albums on iTunes?
I am extremely grateful for your support, no matter which format you choose to legally obtain my music in, so you should do whatever makes the most sense for you personally. But since you ASKED... I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads. This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure.
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Would that be less difficult than sending more solar cells?
Almost certainly. The energy density of nuclear fuel is ridiculously high. Photovoltaic panels just can't compete with that, unless some scientists pull a miracle out of their hats.
The GP post was kind of confusingly phrased, wasn't it.
Oh no, someone took a position! The truth does not necessarily lie somewhere in the middle, and rejecting extremes is not inherently the right thing.
You haven't heard? I know some creationists who say that the Genesis story is literally true, but when it said "day" it meant thousands of years, because some verse in the Bible says that God has trouble with our puny human units of time or something. They're called "day-age creationists", and they apparently think the earth was created long before the sun.
Please tell me you're not dusting off the old GNU/Jokes and writing "Google" on them to disguise their dubious origins.
Let's assume for a moment that the leaders of both parties are identical clones of each other. The Democrats would still have to be more war-averse, because otherwise they would alienate their base. They might not fight very hard to keep us out of wars, but I doubt that they'll try very hard to get us into any wars either. That's more than I can say about the Republicans, who have to play to a more hawkish base.
Fat chance getting GOOD open-source drivers in a timely fashion (as in, before the hardware is 2-3 generations behind), unless Intel writes them.
That's the point. Intel writes open source Linux drivers for their graphics hardware. They've done so for a while now. I find closed source graphics drivers to be a headache, so if Intel is getting into the high-end market, that's a hopeful sign. What are you complaining about?
And to bring this back on topic: the VM in the article can (or will soon) look at what the types of x, y, and z usually are and then guess. It can generate optimized code on the assumption that x and y are (for example) floats. Just throw in a check to execute a more general version of the code if that assumption is wrong, and you're good to go. Thanks to the way CPUs work, the overhead of checking should be negligible.
I don't know why people say that any interpreted/JITed/VMed/etc. program can be as fast (or faster! The audacity!) than C code. Whatever tricks and shortcuts your favorite language's interpreter/whatever is taking, can also be exploited in a C program by any decent programmer (absolutely all of them if you count using a bit of inline assembly to still be C.)
Some optimization information is not available at compile-time. If you can identify the common case, you can make it fast -- and sometimes the common case changes over time, so the only way to measure it is at runtime. Adaptive optimization can do cool things like better inlining, re-ordering branches, all sorts of fun stuff.
You seem to like C++, so let me pick an example familiar to people who fret about C++ speed: virtual method calls. C++ has to use a vtable at runtime when you call a virtual method, so that can be slow. But if you had a pretty good idea of what method that virtual call is probably going to call, then you can just assume that that's what will happen. You can inline this common case, and just insert some code to check if you're wrong at runtime. It's like branch prediction in the CPU: if you guess wrong, then you pay a price. But most of the time you won't guess wrong.
I'm sure you can take advantage of this in C/C++, but only in a very theoretical sense of the word "can".
What's interesting is that the Bible has survived 2000+ yrs not because it was written on "nickel ..." disc, but because it is something of value that was passed from generation to generation. My guess is that this disc won't last ten years because the content is not valuable/meaningful to anyone. It will simply be forgotten.
There are two problems with this approach to preserving records of current languages:
1. Can you guarantee that people will continue to care? Christianity won the lottery and became a major religion, unlike all the other middle eastern sects around that time. Societies change.
2. Not that many people care now. I mean, honestly, if you went up to ten people on the street and asked them if they really cared about preserving a record of our current languages for thousands of years, you probably wouldn't get many enthusiastic "hell yes" answers.
All they had to do to support Linux was ignore it. Instead, they inserted code to detect Linux and give it broken information.
(I love Girl Genius, so I'm interested in your opinion.)
When you've got this kind of publicity shitstorm going, you don't need to grovel to the FTC. I actually hear about this from random people in real life; it's that big.
Where did David Brin come into this? Brin is an excellent science fiction author, but he is not Dijkstra.
I consider that to be a form of child abuse.
Bah, I created it first and called it MegaPacketBlast X-Treem!
One of the cooler features of this card is that it can be programmed to run things like firewalls on its own processor.
The spellings you're looking for are "Chappa'ai" and "Tau'ri". It seems the Goa'uld are big on apostrophes.
If you're male, a vasectomy is a simple, effective outpatient procedure.
I use Myspace by staying the hell away from it and not having an account. It keeps a bunch of dumbasses from polluting the rest of the internet with their garbage, and for that I thank it.
The lesson here is: when repeating variants of jokes that were tired and old years ago, make sure that they aren't based on ridiculous premises. Would you like to hear my Prohibition jokes? They're so timely and relevant!
Indeed, IIRC Freescale is developing some microcontrollers with Flash and MRAM onboard. One nice thing about this is that Flash writes can take a while, due to the way Flash memory is laid out on the chip, but MRAM should be quite a bit faster.
Wrong, asshat. Emacs is remarkably lightweight by modern standards. Stop repeating stuff that hasn't been true for over a decade.
If you're using Firefox, try pressing Ctrl-+ to increase the font size in the current tab when you visit Slashdot. It's annoying, but it works for me.
Tim Sloane of Ijamsville, MD asks: Al, which of these purchasing methods should I use in order to make sure the most profit gets to you: Buying one of your albums on CD, or buying one of your albums on iTunes?
I am extremely grateful for your support, no matter which format you choose to legally obtain my music in, so you should do whatever makes the most sense for you personally. But since you ASKED... I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads. This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure.
Sorry for the double-post.