Probably too late for a proper reply. An old roommate of mine used to occasionally make dies. Like anything in manufacturing, pick two of three: accurate, hard-wearing, cheap. For high-speed production you need to make especially costly dies; even a cheap die for something the size of one Lego brick would set you back several hundred dollars, and you couldn't expect to use a very dense/high-quality plastic with it (due to injection pressures), nor expect it to last much beyond a few dozen or scores of casts for any sort of reasonable accuracy. I suppose for very high tolerances, sharp narrow edges (which Lego have), high speed, and hard plastics you would be paying many thousands (or more?) for the die; the costs grow enormously if you want a die for large pieces, i.e., more than a few square cm. And you would have to replace the die fairly often. The cost of the plastic is trivial compared to the capital cost of the die.
As for technological advances... well, there's only so much you can do to make tooling steel better; basically, it is a materials-science question, and the advances there are not quick. For instance, except for CAD/CAM there have not been significant advances in tooling that would help in the manufacture of the die, that I know of, for probably the last 50 years.
I assume by "pure capitalism" you mean a sort of anarchistic no-holds-barred free-exchange? Capitalism works just fine with fair regulation. In fact, I would claim that most of the excesses that you (might? probably? devil's-advocaty?) ascribe to "capitalism" are actually a result of capitalism in a unfair regulatory environment.
I don't have any proof for this, but then, neither do you.
Somewhat smaller than 1x2 pixels. If we assume three 8-bit channels, then each pixel has 2^24 possible combinations of color. While this would take only a little while to generate on your home computer (a few seconds or minutes), a 1x2 image has 2^48 possible combinations. This is roughly 10^15 (million billion). If we assume some sort of TGA encoding, this takes 16 words for each image, thus requiring about ~2^53 words to store. That requires petabyte storage. The latency is what kills you in writing these to disk, but if you allow the machine to write a billion images to disk per second it only takes about 50 days-or-so to write the entire set. A 1x3 image-set would be intractible, as they would require ~Avagadro's number of images to be produced and written, e.g., about tens of millions of petabytes, and on order of millions of years to write to disk. A 2x2 image-set is well beyond our current comprehension of storable information, and probably beyond the energy output of the sun, and 4x4 would require more atoms than there are in the universe, i.e., generates 2^(16*24)~~10^120 images.
This is a common logical fallacy I see trotted out all the time. My girlfriend satisfies the requirements of a strong AI, yet she cannot program. To drive this point home, you are a strong AI made (presumably) from organic molecules; why aren't you some sort of recursive o-chem synthesizing super genius? Just because it is a computer based strong AI, doesn't mean it will know, care, or be able to program, or create better AIs.
I want to mod you up and down. I want to mod you up: always expect to die; in the `long' run I think the chances of something happening to end my existence will almost certainly approach unity. OTOH, you're being a naysayer: there is a huge difference between our understanding of nature and that of some Bronze-age Emperor, as in, we have a fairly good understanding of the scientific process, and the application thereof to physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Now, will I ever see some sort of man-machine immortality? I like to think so... it sounds cool. What about my children? Probably much more likely; by the time they're 90 years old, assuming the vernacular "Moore's Law" holds, they should be able to hold a computer in their hands with enough power to emulate the important cognitive and memory functions of the same complexity as a human brain. The only question, then, is if our understanding of neurobiology is great enough to allow a transference, and what that transference actually means. This, of course, completely discounts any leaps in understanding what, and if, "sentience" exists outside of our narcissistic insistence.
You've fallen to a logical fallacy associated with strong AI. You're requirement of strong AI essentially boils down to "I think, therefore I am intelligent; thus anything that is intelligent must think like me." This means that any advances in AI (note the "artificial" in AI) will necessarily be non-starters because it is does not match your biased view. In addition, you claim to "understand information", yet you can probably give no definition other than anecdotal that "information" can be "understood." At best, you're description will come to something like "I can come up with alternate definitions and wave my hands until someone else goes 'Oh.'"
Also, considering that most of the advances in AI occurred in the 80's tells me that you're slinging BS from the hip, anyways.
BTW, I am not an AI researcher... languages/compilers guy.
I'm sorry. 100Ghz? You ever hear of speed limits? There's an important one, and 100Ghz kind of fucks you. Unless your processor is 486-like in quality. Even then... I'm skeptical. 100Ghz gives you only millimeters of traversal time.
2) Keyboard cleaner (cheetos and pepsi and genetic splatter, oh my!)
The cleaning staff at a major educational institution I once worked at nearly went on strike over whether or not they had to clean keyboards/mice. It was finally decided that each employee was responsible for maintaining a "clean computing environment" and the cleaning staff was off the hook. The entire thing was sparked by an upper-management's son who had... predilections.
I think I understand what you mean by "5x" faster. However, what I hope it means is that I can "surf the internets" five times faster: five times reading speed; five times download speed; five times... uh... meditation speed. Y'know. All the "fives" in my geek life.
Dude. A story is a story. I had to read bits of the Bible in a 1st year college English course. It wasn't very interesting. The only cool parts were when the Israelites went around and started kicking ass. That said, there's plenty of fiction literature (and even movies!) that are way better done. Personally, I like 300 and the Ultimate comic book series.
That said, I wouldn't go around claiming any of it was -real-. People who do that are smoking crack.
Re:People use Photoshop to Dev the Web too Adobe!
on
Adobe To Port AIR To Linux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Most cross-platform libraries attempt to have a single API for all the GUI toolkits, and then write adaption layers from each toolkit to that uniform API. The AbiWord toolkit instead abstracts and isolates cross-platform capabilities with fairly rigorous interfaces, and then writes per-toolkit code for each platform. I know it sounds like semantic quibbling, but the architectures are very different when you look into code. Adobe prefers the second method because they don't have to deal with a lowest-common-denominator like wxWidgets, etc., but also get to leverage as much code as possible. Combining that with the Adam/Eve libraries allows them to offload GUI logic into a declarative language which is easily checked for structural conformance. The layout-engine which actually renders the window (by "render" they mean to convert the declaration into the underlying GUI-toolkit) is written per toolkit.
In case you're wondering why they took this direction, Adobe has a fairly strong research group called "STLabs"; if you can find their online presence, check out Alexander Stepanov (inventor of the STL to boot!), Mat Marcus, and Sean Parent (Sean is an important driver for all of this).
In the 90s I learned C and C++. They're still relevant and I use them all the time; I know many programmers who learned those two languages even earlier, i.e., in the 70s and 80s. About 5 years ago I picked up Python, which has been around (in one form or another) for a couple of decades. I learned SPAD (a computer algebra language) a couple of years ago, and there's SPAD code from the 60s.
I still do all of my Windows coding in a C++ (in-house, open-sourced) wrapper around C; I also use wxWidgets in any of several languages, because the API is the same across a number of different languages---and wxWidgets is what? 15 years old?
Sounds like you made poor choices. Also, if you have a problem with "learning all the time," why the hell are you reading Slashdot?
"Nowhere in the constitution does it provide a "right" to privacy, but not only was such a right "interpreted" to exist when no such right existed before, it brought with it the "right" to an abortion with strong arguments that this right is absolute (no exceptions)."
It certainly does, they're called the "9th" and "10th" amendments, although I prefer "forgotten and ignored".
Exactly. Airport security is stupid; I want airplane security. I need a secure airport like I need a secure Starbucks: not at all. On this topic, there are a lot of political "dialogs" managed by the media which address an issue with a pair of "polar" answers that are both Bad Ideas (TM). For example: nationalized health care plans, e.g., Clinton's mandated insurance scheme. I don't need insurance when I'm injured, I need fucking health care; cut out the middle man and make sure I'm treated! etc. etc.
They invented new base pairs, not "new replicating genetic code." Also, even if they *did* invent a "new replicating genetic code" calling it cancer is preposterous: if I managed to cross a radish and a tulip (beautiful -and- tasty!), this is a "new replicating genetic code" but, and I can't stress this enough, it is not cancer.
Hm. I just thought of an even better way to say this, which happens to tie in non-recreational sex, but then the believability quotient would fall, seeing as how this is Slashdot, and all.
A little bit of bullshit... I *hate* Safari. I've dragged that fucker to./Trash and rm'ed maybe 8 or 10 times now. Let me go check in Applications real quick... la dee da... yup: IT IS RIGHT FUCKING THERE.
Layout widgets using sizers or boxes, a la GTK or wxWidgets? This irritates me. Why can't I express my layout constraints as... constraints? What happened to all the cool imperative constraint languages like MetaPost and Asymptote? Why aren't these features available in windowing packages? Where have all the declarative languages gone?
Slashdot Mirror
Probably too late for a proper reply. An old roommate of mine used to occasionally make dies. Like anything in manufacturing, pick two of three: accurate, hard-wearing, cheap. For high-speed production you need to make especially costly dies; even a cheap die for something the size of one Lego brick would set you back several hundred dollars, and you couldn't expect to use a very dense/high-quality plastic with it (due to injection pressures), nor expect it to last much beyond a few dozen or scores of casts for any sort of reasonable accuracy. I suppose for very high tolerances, sharp narrow edges (which Lego have), high speed, and hard plastics you would be paying many thousands (or more?) for the die; the costs grow enormously if you want a die for large pieces, i.e., more than a few square cm. And you would have to replace the die fairly often. The cost of the plastic is trivial compared to the capital cost of the die.
As for technological advances... well, there's only so much you can do to make tooling steel better; basically, it is a materials-science question, and the advances there are not quick. For instance, except for CAD/CAM there have not been significant advances in tooling that would help in the manufacture of the die, that I know of, for probably the last 50 years.
Because solar insolation is (peak) 1KW/M^2, so unless you had a car 5 meters wide and 15 meters long, you're going to have a 1HP motor.
I assume by "pure capitalism" you mean a sort of anarchistic no-holds-barred free-exchange? Capitalism works just fine with fair regulation. In fact, I would claim that most of the excesses that you (might? probably? devil's-advocaty?) ascribe to "capitalism" are actually a result of capitalism in a unfair regulatory environment.
I don't have any proof for this, but then, neither do you.
You're gonna need more '$' if you want to make that TeX go.
Now place a flame over the top of the jar.
No, on second thought, don't do that unless you're in a lab with a flame cabinet and are experienced with lab techniques. But still.
Fuck me, that'll teach me to read through the instructions all the way, next time.
so.... it's a *clever* scratch, and not just any scratch, then?
Somewhat smaller than 1x2 pixels. If we assume three 8-bit channels, then each pixel has 2^24 possible combinations of color. While this would take only a little while to generate on your home computer (a few seconds or minutes), a 1x2 image has 2^48 possible combinations. This is roughly 10^15 (million billion). If we assume some sort of TGA encoding, this takes 16 words for each image, thus requiring about ~2^53 words to store. That requires petabyte storage. The latency is what kills you in writing these to disk, but if you allow the machine to write a billion images to disk per second it only takes about 50 days-or-so to write the entire set. A 1x3 image-set would be intractible, as they would require ~Avagadro's number of images to be produced and written, e.g., about tens of millions of petabytes, and on order of millions of years to write to disk. A 2x2 image-set is well beyond our current comprehension of storable information, and probably beyond the energy output of the sun, and 4x4 would require more atoms than there are in the universe, i.e., generates 2^(16*24)~~10^120 images.
I suppose you mean "flawed logic"?
This is a common logical fallacy I see trotted out all the time. My girlfriend satisfies the requirements of a strong AI, yet she cannot program. To drive this point home, you are a strong AI made (presumably) from organic molecules; why aren't you some sort of recursive o-chem synthesizing super genius? Just because it is a computer based strong AI, doesn't mean it will know, care, or be able to program, or create better AIs.
I want to mod you up and down. I want to mod you up: always expect to die; in the `long' run I think the chances of something happening to end my existence will almost certainly approach unity. OTOH, you're being a naysayer: there is a huge difference between our understanding of nature and that of some Bronze-age Emperor, as in, we have a fairly good understanding of the scientific process, and the application thereof to physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Now, will I ever see some sort of man-machine immortality? I like to think so... it sounds cool. What about my children? Probably much more likely; by the time they're 90 years old, assuming the vernacular "Moore's Law" holds, they should be able to hold a computer in their hands with enough power to emulate the important cognitive and memory functions of the same complexity as a human brain. The only question, then, is if our understanding of neurobiology is great enough to allow a transference, and what that transference actually means. This, of course, completely discounts any leaps in understanding what, and if, "sentience" exists outside of our narcissistic insistence.
You've fallen to a logical fallacy associated with strong AI. You're requirement of strong AI essentially boils down to "I think, therefore I am intelligent; thus anything that is intelligent must think like me." This means that any advances in AI (note the "artificial" in AI) will necessarily be non-starters because it is does not match your biased view. In addition, you claim to "understand information", yet you can probably give no definition other than anecdotal that "information" can be "understood." At best, you're description will come to something like "I can come up with alternate definitions and wave my hands until someone else goes 'Oh.'"
Also, considering that most of the advances in AI occurred in the 80's tells me that you're slinging BS from the hip, anyways.
BTW, I am not an AI researcher... languages/compilers guy.
I'm sorry. 100Ghz? You ever hear of speed limits? There's an important one, and 100Ghz kind of fucks you. Unless your processor is 486-like in quality. Even then... I'm skeptical. 100Ghz gives you only millimeters of traversal time.
2) Keyboard cleaner (cheetos and pepsi and genetic splatter, oh my!)
... predilections.
The cleaning staff at a major educational institution I once worked at nearly went on strike over whether or not they had to clean keyboards/mice. It was finally decided that each employee was responsible for maintaining a "clean computing environment" and the cleaning staff was off the hook. The entire thing was sparked by an upper-management's son who had
I think I understand what you mean by "5x" faster. However, what I hope it means is that I can "surf the internets" five times faster: five times reading speed; five times download speed; five times ... uh ... meditation speed. Y'know. All the "fives" in my geek life.
Dude. A story is a story. I had to read bits of the Bible in a 1st year college English course. It wasn't very interesting. The only cool parts were when the Israelites went around and started kicking ass. That said, there's plenty of fiction literature (and even movies!) that are way better done. Personally, I like 300 and the Ultimate comic book series.
That said, I wouldn't go around claiming any of it was -real-. People who do that are smoking crack.
Most cross-platform libraries attempt to have a single API for all the GUI toolkits, and then write adaption layers from each toolkit to that uniform API. The AbiWord toolkit instead abstracts and isolates cross-platform capabilities with fairly rigorous interfaces, and then writes per-toolkit code for each platform. I know it sounds like semantic quibbling, but the architectures are very different when you look into code. Adobe prefers the second method because they don't have to deal with a lowest-common-denominator like wxWidgets, etc., but also get to leverage as much code as possible. Combining that with the Adam/Eve libraries allows them to offload GUI logic into a declarative language which is easily checked for structural conformance. The layout-engine which actually renders the window (by "render" they mean to convert the declaration into the underlying GUI-toolkit) is written per toolkit.
In case you're wondering why they took this direction, Adobe has a fairly strong research group called "STLabs"; if you can find their online presence, check out Alexander Stepanov (inventor of the STL to boot!), Mat Marcus, and Sean Parent (Sean is an important driver for all of this).
I saw "LoC" and thought "Lines of Code"; my second thought was that you have some *mad* job security.
In the 90s I learned C and C++. They're still relevant and I use them all the time; I know many programmers who learned those two languages even earlier, i.e., in the 70s and 80s. About 5 years ago I picked up Python, which has been around (in one form or another) for a couple of decades. I learned SPAD (a computer algebra language) a couple of years ago, and there's SPAD code from the 60s.
I still do all of my Windows coding in a C++ (in-house, open-sourced) wrapper around C; I also use wxWidgets in any of several languages, because the API is the same across a number of different languages---and wxWidgets is what? 15 years old?
Sounds like you made poor choices. Also, if you have a problem with "learning all the time," why the hell are you reading Slashdot?
"Nowhere in the constitution does it provide a "right" to privacy, but not only was such a right "interpreted" to exist when no such right existed before, it brought with it the "right" to an abortion with strong arguments that this right is absolute (no exceptions)."
It certainly does, they're called the "9th" and "10th" amendments, although I prefer "forgotten and ignored".
Exactly. Airport security is stupid; I want airplane security. I need a secure airport like I need a secure Starbucks: not at all. On this topic, there are a lot of political "dialogs" managed by the media which address an issue with a pair of "polar" answers that are both Bad Ideas (TM). For example: nationalized health care plans, e.g., Clinton's mandated insurance scheme. I don't need insurance when I'm injured, I need fucking health care; cut out the middle man and make sure I'm treated! etc. etc.
It doesn't matter how redundant it is if the whole building falls into the Abyss.
They invented new base pairs, not "new replicating genetic code." Also, even if they *did* invent a "new replicating genetic code" calling it cancer is preposterous: if I managed to cross a radish and a tulip (beautiful -and- tasty!), this is a "new replicating genetic code" but, and I can't stress this enough, it is not cancer.
Hm. I just thought of an even better way to say this, which happens to tie in non-recreational sex, but then the believability quotient would fall, seeing as how this is Slashdot, and all.
A little bit of bullshit... I *hate* Safari. I've dragged that fucker to ./Trash and rm'ed maybe 8 or 10 times now. Let me go check in Applications real quick ... la dee da ... yup: IT IS RIGHT FUCKING THERE.
Layout widgets using sizers or boxes, a la GTK or wxWidgets? This irritates me. Why can't I express my layout constraints as ... constraints? What happened to all the cool imperative constraint languages like MetaPost and Asymptote? Why aren't these features available in windowing packages? Where have all the declarative languages gone?
I know this is probably waaaaay too late, but we call this "jury nullification." Look it up.