Re:I'm gonna get crap for this, but...
on
Plasma Comes Alive
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· Score: 1
Whether you believe in God (or don't), understand that life developed as a direct result of the way in which our Universe functions, not in spite of it.
Where is your proof for this? Whether you believe in evolution (or don't) understand that as yet there is no proof that life on Earth developed from mere amino acids, water, lightning, and random chance. There is pretty much proof of evolution from lower lifeforms eventually into our own, but the evidence for the first appearance of a Cell coming out of a combinations of the aformentioned items is very sketchy at best.
What exactly are the alternatives that everyone would love? While some people do hate it, if you had 90% of people using OpenOffice or some other open source document editor, there would be a decent portion of them that hated it as well. It's the nature of a product that's used to provide an incredibly malleable yet intelligent interface to one of the most ambiguous and complex entities: Your thoughts.
If you really want a new palm phone with analog capabilities, why not just get the newest version of the Kyocera smart phone, the 7135?
It's much smaller than the 6035 smart phone (which I also currently have and love), It has full Palm OS 4.1 support, color screen, both digital and analog support, and the best part is that it's a phone before a PDA.
This is the biggest problem with the Treos. They threw an entire qwerty keyboard on a phone. No matter what funcationality is EVER added to a phone, the buttons with numbers on them should be big and easy to press while holding the phone in one hand. I want a phone with a PDA built into it. Not the other way around.
If you read the article, you'll see that these are not meant for computer displays. In fact, their important because they can more cheaply provide illumination over a large area, but still be thin. It just uses reflective surfaces in a very thin enclosure to spread the light out from an LED chip or chips in the center.
This will be useful for things like traffic lights, brake lights, and home lighting.
1) Databases - a lot of databases are too big for a pointer offset to fit into 32 bits. Ever notice that the 120Gig hard drive you just bought has more than 2^32 bytes on it? (yes - I know that the hard drive is split into 512-byte sectors, and that you won't overflow 32 bits until you get drives larger than 2 TB, but how long will that take:)
So, in other words, right now a 64 bit CPU is not needed for this. Why did you list it?
Video (editing, encoding, etc) - a single layer of a single side of a DVD is more than can be addressed by a 32-bit pointer. The amount of source data used to create the highly compressed DVD data is mind-boggling. (A high quality transfer from film is about 100M per frame. A 2-hour film has 172800 frames [assuming it's not IMax - that's higer resolution and more frames per second] - that's 17 terabytes of raw data!)
I believe the original poster said common applications. This would be a highly specialized application that very few people use and is probably done on a unix system with a 64 bit cpu already.
High dynamic range images (including photographs and extrme high color video games) - the data types being used by the GeForce FX (similar to the EXR format released by ILM) have 16 bits of data per channel - this totals 64 bits for each RGBA pixel.
The work on the pixels is done in the video card anyway, which already supports 128 bits.
Basically, none of these are very good reasons for a 64-bit desktop CPU. In the future, more common applications may arise, but for the moment, it's just not very useful.
trying to produce an industrial-strength multi-platform FPS game, and there are a few obstacles along the way that seperates us from the bigger companies:
There's one more obstacle that, while it doesn't separate you from the big companies, will be a large obstacle... Originality. How do you expect to compete by doing the exact same thing as everyone else, but with less resources.
Why don't you try makeing a NEW type of game? It could very well cost less resources and still be a better game.
Windows XP is not the system to emulate: its user interface is way too messy and too complex, it has too many unnecessary and confusing options, and its interaction is illogical.
This is also a pretty good description of the current set of Linux interfaces. If someone tries to move to Linux they not only get a confusing interface, but it's one they don't understand. At least they're familiar with the Windows XP interface.
There are keyboard layouts that are in theory much better than QWERTY, but people stick with it simply because the effort required to change itsn't worth the gain. Until someone makes a really intuitive and efficient interface for Linux, for a lot of people, it's best to stick with what they know.
What's important to remember here is that there is a difference between being able to survive and being able to form. Sure, life can adapt to living in extreme environments, but I doubt very much that these environments are condusive to forming an actual life form.
As computer power goes up, the speed of most graphical applications stays the same. Why? Because they add features that use the increase in power.
As computers get faster, why not use the power to deliver a better experience for the cutstomer and thus a reason to upgrade. Again, I'm not talking just about Windows. This is true for most graphical applications.
KDE and Gnome are the same way. I know everyone here hates Windows, but the truth is the truth.
Does anybody else realize how confusing buying a cheap 'lindows' PC might be for a non tech-savvy user? Their website alludes to running standard windows software, and hinting that software 'might' be compatible...
Actually, they changed directions a little while ago. Their website now says almost nothing about running standard Windows applications. They changed their tune to now simply give easy access to the many native linux applications that are available.
They call it the Click-N-Run Warehouse. It allows a user to just select an application from their warehouse and it will automatically be downloaded and installed. I think they realized that they were going to run into the problems you describe and decided they were biting off more than they could chew.
Patents and copyrights are about making money, NOT fostering innovation.
I beg to differ. They are about making money AND fostering innovation. It is exactly the possibility of reaping large profits from a patented product that fosters innovation. The fact is, a vast majority of GPLed software is just a copy of a successful proprietary version. Some are good copies, but copies none the less.
Is Mozilla more innovative than Internet Explorer or Opera?
Is Linux (including the various desktops) more innovative than MacOS X?
I would say they are not. In fact, I can think of MANY proprietary software programs that are truely innovative. The open source area produces few programs that fit this bill. They simply play follow the leader.
As long as it isn't going backwards (which certainly is not the case)...
Let me be the first to tell you it is. While it is true that Linux is not getting worse, for it to move forward, it needs to move at at least the same speed as Windows. Frankly, I think Linux was closer to windows five years ago than it is now. Thus, in that sense it is moving backwards.
While I used to want to see Linux on the desktop do more than just play follow the leader with Windows, the fact is that with the current amount of effort being put into desktop Linux, it doesn't now nor ever will stand a chance against Windows.
What happens when the government mandates that car companies spend time and money on new card designs:
EV-1 (An overpriced piece of crap)
What happens when companies innovate at their own pace, but pushed by competition:
AUTOnomy (a possible revolution in car design)
Just because the government isn't spending billions of dollars on some particular type of research doesn't mean that business won't fill the gap. In fact, this is precisely what is supposed to happen.
Companies aren't there just to be evil and pollute. They're there to make money. If people want more eco-friendly cars, that's exactly what they'll get.
Do you think you should be able to go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and have several friends sit at the table with you while you eat and offer them bits off your plate.
In a word... No. Try this at ANY buffet and you'll be summarily kicked out. Why? Your example is simply a trick to allow your friends to thieve food from the restaurant. They, much like the cable companies, are very aware of this and are trying to stop it.
Just because it is possible doesn't make it right.
Selling people Linux machines with Wine isn't a win for Linux. You still have to shell out probably more cash for Office than for the machines themselves, and it's probably not going to work very well, turning even more people away from "things that are different".
Umm.. Yeah it is a win. People aren't going to go out and buy MS Office if there's already this nice FREE Open Office program pre-installed that they can use. That goes for many of the other programs that Lindows comes with.
The fact is, people won't get it unless they at least have the option to run windows programs. If more people start using Lindows, they will certainly be more apt to use Linux programs since they'll run better. As more people use Linux programs, more companies will support the operating system.
Isn't giving people options what Linux is all about?
From my experience, they might be combining MS-like stability and security (running everything as root etc.) with Linux-like usability*, resulting in a horribly unusable OS - for which Linux will most probably get the blame by mainstream reporters. Ah well, we'll see.
More like Wine stability combined with Linux-like usability which will result in a horribly unusable OS. Wine is the real problem here. It is not even beta much less ready to be used by Joe Avg. User. Even if Lindows makes it easy to run Windows programs with Wine it doesn't matter since a vast majority of them will simply not run correctly.
Why do we have to go to war now? Because approval ratings are down...
Approval ratings for Bush could scarcely be higher. According to this poll, currently 77% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing while 15% do not. I don't see his approval ratings rising at all if we attack Iraq since it is known to be a controversial move. Maybe he's pushing it because (gasp!) he believes it would be the right thing to do.
Obviously you didn't read the detailed investigation that clearly presented a mountain of evidence against your arguments for cameras at red lights. Here's summary, but I suggest you read the whole thing.
(3) The cameras are nothing more than a money making scheme.
The article pretty much proves this point through unambiguous data. The cameras are not placed at the most accident prone red lights. Just to drive this point home, MOST of the worst accident lights in the cities with red light cameras were not chosen for the location of the cameras. They're placed at the intersections with the shortest yellow lights and most volume. Many of the lights they're placed at don't have any accident problems at all!
Most importantly, the reason these cameras are there is to reduce accidents. Is it working? NO!!! Read the article. All CREDIBLE studies done on this have conlcuded that the cameras at least do nothing and often increase accidents. Mainly rear end accidents because people slam on their brakes to avoid getting a ticket. In fact, at many of these intersections, the rear end accidents have doubled or more.
Intuition says these cameras should help save lives, but the statistics don't lie. This red light camera business is simply a Bad Thing in its current form. Maybe red light cameras could be used in certain places, in certain ways for good, but that's not what's going on now.
It's sad that producers have such a low opinion of viewers these days, that they choose to dumb down otherwise intentionally texdured and compled material.
The problem here is not that producers are dumbing down the material in Star Trek. It's that people have to high a view of what Star Trek is. People don't watch it purely for the intellectual stimulation. They watch it when they come home from a full day of intellectual stimulation at work. They want something that is interesting, but also not too difficult to understand. This isn't because they're too stupid to be able to appreciate it. It's because they need a little escapism to brake the monotomy. No more, no less.
Don't give credit where it isn't due. Star Trek was never more than a break from reality. A look at what could be. You can find FAR better mental stimulation in classic books than any episode of Deep Space Nine or STNG.
That's what helped me. Seeing my work help others gave me a sense of accomplishment that I just didn't have in college. Coding is still somewhat fun, but the goal is more real in business. You don't just get a grade, someone tells you that your product has helped them.
Slashdot Mirror
Where is your proof for this? Whether you believe in evolution (or don't) understand that as yet there is no proof that life on Earth developed from mere amino acids, water, lightning, and random chance. There is pretty much proof of evolution from lower lifeforms eventually into our own, but the evidence for the first appearance of a Cell coming out of a combinations of the aformentioned items is very sketchy at best.
What exactly are the alternatives that everyone would love? While some people do hate it, if you had 90% of people using OpenOffice or some other open source document editor, there would be a decent portion of them that hated it as well. It's the nature of a product that's used to provide an incredibly malleable yet intelligent interface to one of the most ambiguous and complex entities: Your thoughts.
If you really want a new palm phone with analog capabilities, why not just get the newest version of the Kyocera smart phone, the 7135?
It's much smaller than the 6035 smart phone (which I also currently have and love), It has full Palm OS 4.1 support, color screen, both digital and analog support, and the best part is that it's a phone before a PDA.
This is the biggest problem with the Treos. They threw an entire qwerty keyboard on a phone. No matter what funcationality is EVER added to a phone, the buttons with numbers on them should be big and easy to press while holding the phone in one hand. I want a phone with a PDA built into it. Not the other way around.
The headline says Columbia Streaks Toward Florida Landing. Nowhere in the article does it say that they landed successfully.
Found a nice mirror.
If you read the article, you'll see that these are not meant for computer displays. In fact, their important because they can more cheaply provide illumination over a large area, but still be thin. It just uses reflective surfaces in a very thin enclosure to spread the light out from an LED chip or chips in the center.
This will be useful for things like traffic lights, brake lights, and home lighting.
So, in other words, right now a 64 bit CPU is not needed for this. Why did you list it?
Video (editing, encoding, etc) - a single layer of a single side of a DVD is more than can be addressed by a 32-bit pointer. The amount of source data used to create the highly compressed DVD data is mind-boggling. (A high quality transfer from film is about 100M per frame. A 2-hour film has 172800 frames [assuming it's not IMax - that's higer resolution and more frames per second] - that's 17 terabytes of raw data!)
I believe the original poster said common applications. This would be a highly specialized application that very few people use and is probably done on a unix system with a 64 bit cpu already.
High dynamic range images (including photographs and extrme high color video games) - the data types being used by the GeForce FX (similar to the EXR format released by ILM) have 16 bits of data per channel - this totals 64 bits for each RGBA pixel.
The work on the pixels is done in the video card anyway, which already supports 128 bits.
Basically, none of these are very good reasons for a 64-bit desktop CPU. In the future, more common applications may arise, but for the moment, it's just not very useful.
There's one more obstacle that, while it doesn't separate you from the big companies, will be a large obstacle... Originality. How do you expect to compete by doing the exact same thing as everyone else, but with less resources.
Why don't you try makeing a NEW type of game? It could very well cost less resources and still be a better game.
This is also a pretty good description of the current set of Linux interfaces. If someone tries to move to Linux they not only get a confusing interface, but it's one they don't understand. At least they're familiar with the Windows XP interface.
There are keyboard layouts that are in theory much better than QWERTY, but people stick with it simply because the effort required to change itsn't worth the gain. Until someone makes a really intuitive and efficient interface for Linux, for a lot of people, it's best to stick with what they know.
What's important to remember here is that there is a difference between being able to survive and being able to form. Sure, life can adapt to living in extreme environments, but I doubt very much that these environments are condusive to forming an actual life form.
As computer power goes up, the speed of most graphical applications stays the same. Why? Because they add features that use the increase in power.
As computers get faster, why not use the power to deliver a better experience for the cutstomer and thus a reason to upgrade. Again, I'm not talking just about Windows. This is true for most graphical applications.
KDE and Gnome are the same way. I know everyone here hates Windows, but the truth is the truth.
Actually, they changed directions a little while ago. Their website now says almost nothing about running standard Windows applications. They changed their tune to now simply give easy access to the many native linux applications that are available.
They call it the Click-N-Run Warehouse. It allows a user to just select an application from their warehouse and it will automatically be downloaded and installed. I think they realized that they were going to run into the problems you describe and decided they were biting off more than they could chew.
We've heard a lot about Lindows, but as far as I know, it was always only a beta.
Maybe they just went straight to 2.0 to make it sound like they are somewhat stable.
I beg to differ. They are about making money AND fostering innovation. It is exactly the possibility of reaping large profits from a patented product that fosters innovation. The fact is, a vast majority of GPLed software is just a copy of a successful proprietary version. Some are good copies, but copies none the less.
Is Mozilla more innovative than Internet Explorer or Opera?
Is Linux (including the various desktops) more innovative than MacOS X?
I would say they are not. In fact, I can think of MANY proprietary software programs that are truely innovative. The open source area produces few programs that fit this bill. They simply play follow the leader.
Spoken like a true troll. Go back to your Linux and play while I get some work done.
Let me be the first to tell you it is. While it is true that Linux is not getting worse, for it to move forward, it needs to move at at least the same speed as Windows. Frankly, I think Linux was closer to windows five years ago than it is now. Thus, in that sense it is moving backwards.
While I used to want to see Linux on the desktop do more than just play follow the leader with Windows, the fact is that with the current amount of effort being put into desktop Linux, it doesn't now nor ever will stand a chance against Windows.
EV-1 (An overpriced piece of crap)
What happens when companies innovate at their own pace, but pushed by competition:
AUTOnomy (a possible revolution in car design)
Just because the government isn't spending billions of dollars on some particular type of research doesn't mean that business won't fill the gap. In fact, this is precisely what is supposed to happen.
Companies aren't there just to be evil and pollute. They're there to make money. If people want more eco-friendly cars, that's exactly what they'll get.
In a word... No. Try this at ANY buffet and you'll be summarily kicked out. Why? Your example is simply a trick to allow your friends to thieve food from the restaurant. They, much like the cable companies, are very aware of this and are trying to stop it.
Just because it is possible doesn't make it right.
Umm.. Yeah it is a win. People aren't going to go out and buy MS Office if there's already this nice FREE Open Office program pre-installed that they can use. That goes for many of the other programs that Lindows comes with.
The fact is, people won't get it unless they at least have the option to run windows programs. If more people start using Lindows, they will certainly be more apt to use Linux programs since they'll run better. As more people use Linux programs, more companies will support the operating system.
Isn't giving people options what Linux is all about?
More like Wine stability combined with Linux-like usability which will result in a horribly unusable OS. Wine is the real problem here. It is not even beta much less ready to be used by Joe Avg. User. Even if Lindows makes it easy to run Windows programs with Wine it doesn't matter since a vast majority of them will simply not run correctly.
Approval ratings for Bush could scarcely be higher. According to this poll, currently 77% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing while 15% do not. I don't see his approval ratings rising at all if we attack Iraq since it is known to be a controversial move. Maybe he's pushing it because (gasp!) he believes it would be the right thing to do.
(3) The cameras are nothing more than a money making scheme.
The article pretty much proves this point through unambiguous data. The cameras are not placed at the most accident prone red lights. Just to drive this point home, MOST of the worst accident lights in the cities with red light cameras were not chosen for the location of the cameras. They're placed at the intersections with the shortest yellow lights and most volume. Many of the lights they're placed at don't have any accident problems at all!
Most importantly, the reason these cameras are there is to reduce accidents. Is it working? NO!!! Read the article. All CREDIBLE studies done on this have conlcuded that the cameras at least do nothing and often increase accidents. Mainly rear end accidents because people slam on their brakes to avoid getting a ticket. In fact, at many of these intersections, the rear end accidents have doubled or more.
Intuition says these cameras should help save lives, but the statistics don't lie. This red light camera business is simply a Bad Thing in its current form. Maybe red light cameras could be used in certain places, in certain ways for good, but that's not what's going on now.
The problem here is not that producers are dumbing down the material in Star Trek. It's that people have to high a view of what Star Trek is. People don't watch it purely for the intellectual stimulation. They watch it when they come home from a full day of intellectual stimulation at work. They want something that is interesting, but also not too difficult to understand. This isn't because they're too stupid to be able to appreciate it. It's because they need a little escapism to brake the monotomy. No more, no less.
Don't give credit where it isn't due. Star Trek was never more than a break from reality. A look at what could be. You can find FAR better mental stimulation in classic books than any episode of Deep Space Nine or STNG.
That's what helped me. Seeing my work help others gave me a sense of accomplishment that I just didn't have in college. Coding is still somewhat fun, but the goal is more real in business. You don't just get a grade, someone tells you that your product has helped them.