Your system will have 4GB, but a small chunk of that memory is going to be use d to store the kernel, all relevant drivers, running services for graphics, virus scanning, printing, mail, and networking. All of these are going to reserve large blocks of memory either by the drivers themselves or when the services are in use. The kernel might even make it a priority to pre-allocate memory to device drivers rather than leave it free for applications to use.
I remember upgrading my PC's memory, thinking it was going to give me a lot more memory for applications to run. To my surprise, the application took even longer to run a large data file, as the kernel was swapping out all the pre-allocated memory.
Sometimes, entertaining assholes - like the thieves who attempted to steal a water tank tower by cutting through all four legs and letting the tank fall onto the back of their flatbed truck. It was unfortunate that they didn't check to see if the tank was full first....
How can it renew itself when, presumably, all cells are "accumulating damage"?
Because the cells in the reproductive parts of an organism are the first to be formed during cell division and are kept in 'suspended animation' until actually needed. Thus, "accumulated damage" isn't so bad for those cells as it is for other cells. Then there is the use of two genetic parents to reduce the risk of genetic defects affecting the offspring.
Look at the prices for spare components like hard disk drives, LCD backlight inverters, cooling fan assemblies, laptop closed detection switches - each of these is likely to need replacing/upgrading during a three-year period.
If only "approved" components are allowed, then there is going to be a considerable markup.
If these notebooks have wireless broadband, then they could also profit from these services. Some mobile network operators are giving away a free laptop with a three-year mobile broadband contract.
It's a deal between the web-owner, Phorm and the ISP. Phorm buys advertising slots for banner adverts from the web-owners as per usual. But instead of just displaying random adverts like a traditional advertiser, they have a pipe attached to the ISP's network, that routes traffic to their facility which performs a deep-packet analysis of all Internet traffic generated by their users. These would be Internet search requests, web-page names, headers and other juicy bits of text. These are associated with each cookie for that PC. Phorm can't use ISP addresses since these might change with dynamic allocations and Wi-Fi/broadband availability.
So, when a webpage owner is visited by that IP address and fetches a banner advert from Phorm, their servers select one based on the cookie making the request.
You can't just block adverts, as your Internet traffic is going to be piped to a Phorm facility regardless if you opt out or not.
With BASIC, every variable was by default a float - even arrays. But many Basic interpreters actually tokenised the programs - it saved space to use a single byte code to represent each keyword, and a variable code to reference variables with optional array indexing by expression.
This website has a disassembly of C64 basic including the floating-point calculations.
The rate of processing performance totally mind-boggles me too - just seeing how all systems are evolving to multi-digit figure FLOP numbers is just amazing.
Home computers at that time (6502/6509/Z80) ran at around 1 MHz . Since instructions took 1 to 3 clocks to run, you get around 300K instructions/second.
Wouldn't 0,0,0 be where the Borg Queen lived with 17 trillion servants (from First Contact.
The coordinates need not be Cartesian, they could also be Spherical (latitude/longitude/radius). But to have a perfect set of integer values would indicate pre-knowledge of Earth. Maybe the Borg enhanced the V'Ger probe, and it was the first alien device they encountered.
I would imagine it would be like when someone tries to pull several "overnighters" where they work late each night until they are completely mentally exhausted, and end up writing garbage code. They make connections, but the wrong ones, so they end up coming in the next day, looking at the design, and wondering what on earth they were trying to achieve with twenty lines of glue code, when a handful of functions was all that was required.
There was guy who had his hypothalamus destroyed due to ill health. This meant he was unable to remember what he had done 10 minutes ago. Even when he wrote a hourly diary, he still found it impossible to believe that he had been doing anything earlier in the day.
That's strange - just about everyone now I see on public transport is using either touchscreen Blackberry's or mobile phones, especially among this demographic. Being able to view street-maps is the biggest advertised application. Though, it is the van drivers who are the ones who stop and ask passer-bys for directions - they "can't read maps" and just ask for a direction to head towards.
At the time Google came out, there were other search engines like "search.com", "askjeeves.com" and "yahoo.com".
The most important factor was response speed. If the search engine didn't come back within 5 seconds of a result, I would switch to a different engine. Yahoo seemed to be the slowest.
Secondly, if I was looking for information on something, and the search results were junk ie. most usually personal web-pages or sales sites rather than review sites, that would be another reason to switch search engine. If I am looking for 'graphics card', I would expect to find results about hardware, and now art supplies. This seemed to affect 'search.com' and 'yahoo.com'. 'askjeeves.com' seemed to be best at finding where to buy stuff.
Thirdly, I don't want a super-complex query page which would ask for: words-to-search-for, words-to-avoid, phrases-to-search-for, phrase-to-avoid-searching-for, select-languages-to-match, select-countries-to-search, select-cities-in-countries-to-search, select-suburbs-in-cities-to-search or a separate begin-search button that had to be clicked before anything would happen which was then followed by a confirm-that-this-is-what-you-want-to-search-for dialog which also had to be clicked before anything would happen.
Google managed to avoid all of these problems - just type in the words you want, put phrases in double quotes, put words you want to avoid preceded with a minus sign, and precede the domain you want with a 'site:' in front of it. Then just press return.
Maybe you need to understand where their prejudices come from before you can convince them to change their ways.
This probably comes from the fact that many people born in Europe and the USA during the late 1880's didn't get a chance to learn to read or write (their parents were too poor to afford to educate all their children). These were the grandparents of people born in the 1940's (who are in their 60's now). They still remember the humiliation of their grandparents not being able to read a newspaper or book, and having to have everything from prescriptions to department stores catalogs explained to them in spoken word, and how their grandparents could only sign legal documents with a big X. So, being able to read a book or newspaper became a status symbol of an education.
Perhaps the solution to this, is to allow the e-readers to have a touch-sensitive screen so that they can do "intelligent" things like solve crosswords, Sudoku, anagram type games, and use the wireless connection to enter their answers into online competitions. Presumably the E-reader would be able to support a virtual keyboard?
Plastic Logic's new device has an A4 sized display, can be continually updated via a wireless link, and can store and display hundreds of pages of newspapers, books, and documents. Richard Archuleta, the chief executive of Plastic Logic, said the display was sufficiently large enough to match a newspaper's layout. "Even though we have positioned this for business documents, newspapers are what everyone asks for," said Archuleta.
The device has the display size of an A4 sheet of paper. This is the size size as office documents, technical reports, and white papers, or a newspaper folded up to read on the train.
Sun used to have 'ambassadors', sales and marketing people who would be contacted when the large companies like Pixar, Ford and Boeing wanted to make a block purchase of servers and workstations for their new projects. The purchasing companies would compare the performance of the different vendors systems and choose a system based on the performance/price ratio combined with a preferred vendor bias.
But when there is so much more competition from commodity systems purchased from online PC system builders, maybe this doesn't happen now. Desktop systems with Four core Intel/AMD with two/three/four SLI/Crossfire accelerator boards with GigaBytes of memory, 8 GBytes memory and 1000 MBit Ethernet are available at consumer prices.
Either way, it's enough to build a piranha tank with a trap door above. But, unfortunately, the only people that would scare are Oompah-Loompahs and Mini-Me.
Microsoft did attempt to bring out tablet PC's, but that never seemed to take off. Yet just by traveling into downtown and seeing people using netbook PC's and LCD touchscreen mobile phones with Internet access, it is obvious to see the direction the market is going in.
Maybe engineers, artists and developers will want to use the large desktop/workstation screens, but for everyone else, being able to read E-mail, manage their social networking page, watch and upload videos, make online bookings wherever they are seems to be more than enough just now. Maybe being able to run Google Earth and integrate that with their videos, pictures, and social networking page will be the next thing.
Some university courses in the UK have internships (or industrial placements) as they call them. The worst internships (which the university coordinator was determined to avoid), were where a local business director was just looking for a 'bright graduate' to sit in a dark corner doing the work that nobody else had time to do. The best internships were where the student was working in a team and actively helping to specifications and making a contribution to a large real-time systems project.
Anything where you are working in a team, working with current or next-generation technology and helping to design or implement hardware/software will count as good experience. If you have a choice in such placements, then choosing an industry with the best long-term career prospects should be the next priority.
Anything mechanical would add weight, jam or burn out, consume more power, scratch the glass on the solar panels, or make the dust stick to the glass even more. The risks made were worse than the potential gains.
The cost of a mobile phone or iPhone is subsided through a contract with the network operator. You sign a three year contract, then the reduction from $400 to $100 is spread through the months at a rate of $8/month.
Slashdot Mirror
Your system will have 4GB, but a small chunk of that memory is going to be use d to store the kernel, all relevant drivers, running services for graphics, virus scanning, printing, mail, and networking. All of these are going to reserve large blocks of memory either by the drivers themselves or when the services are in use. The kernel might even make it a priority to pre-allocate memory to device drivers rather than leave it free for applications to use.
I remember upgrading my PC's memory, thinking it was going to give me a lot more memory for applications to run. To my surprise, the application took even longer to run a large data file, as the kernel was swapping out all the pre-allocated memory.
Sometimes, entertaining assholes - like the thieves who attempted to steal a water tank tower by cutting through all four legs and letting the tank fall onto the back of their flatbed truck. It was unfortunate that they didn't check to see if the tank was full first....
o|-< + 8< 8< -> o,-<
Not so long ago, there was a story about a pilot who was guided into landing by an air-traffic controller through a series of text messages after all the plane's electrical systems failed.
I noticed this too - the first thing I asked myself was "WTF is my last comment in green - where are the comment listings?"
I did manage to find them by clicking one of the buttons on the top (I've forgotten which one now, but it seems to have disappeared anyway).
All the references to "Friends" seem to have disappeared as well - I only have one or two friends now - there used to be a whole list.
What purpose does this change serve?
How can it renew itself when, presumably, all cells are "accumulating damage"?
Because the cells in the reproductive parts of an organism are the first to be formed during cell division and are kept in 'suspended animation' until actually needed. Thus, "accumulated damage" isn't so bad for those cells as it is for other cells. Then there is the use of two genetic parents to reduce the risk of genetic defects affecting the offspring.
Look at the prices for spare components like hard disk drives, LCD backlight inverters, cooling fan assemblies, laptop closed detection switches - each of these is likely to need replacing/upgrading during a three-year period.
If only "approved" components are allowed, then there is going to be a considerable markup.
If these notebooks have wireless broadband, then they could also profit from these services. Some mobile network operators are giving away a free laptop with a three-year mobile broadband contract.
It's a deal between the web-owner, Phorm and the ISP. Phorm buys advertising slots for banner adverts from the web-owners as per usual. But instead of just displaying random adverts like a traditional advertiser, they have a pipe attached to the ISP's network, that routes traffic to their facility which performs a deep-packet analysis of all Internet traffic generated by their users. These would be Internet search requests, web-page names, headers and other juicy bits of text. These are associated with each cookie for that PC. Phorm can't use ISP addresses since these might change with dynamic allocations and Wi-Fi/broadband availability.
So, when a webpage owner is visited by that IP address and fetches a banner advert from Phorm, their servers select one based on the cookie making the request.
You can't just block adverts, as your Internet traffic is going to be piped to a Phorm facility regardless if you opt out or not.
This website present the two photographs side by side. The photographers removed the fencepost appearing to stick out of her head.
There is a time difference of 25 years between the two photographs. The original one was publish in 1970. The second
one was Photoshopped in 1995.
With BASIC, every variable was by default a float - even arrays. But many Basic interpreters actually tokenised the programs - it saved space to use a single byte code to represent each keyword, and a variable code to reference variables with optional array indexing by expression.
This website has a disassembly of C64 basic including the floating-point calculations.
The rate of processing performance totally mind-boggles me too - just seeing how all systems are evolving to multi-digit figure FLOP numbers is just amazing.
Home computers at that time (6502/6509/Z80) ran at around 1 MHz . Since instructions took 1 to 3 clocks to run, you get around 300K instructions/second.
According to De Re Atari's chapter on floating point performance, the maximum times for the various operations were as follows:
Integer -> FP = 1330 micro-seconds
FP -> Integer = 2400
Subtraction = 740
Addition = 710
Multiplication = 12000
Division = 10000
Load = 70
Store = 70
Polynomial evaluation = 88300
Exponentation (e) = 115900
Exponentation (10) = 108800
Natural Logarithm = 136000
Base 10 Logarithm = 125400
Set to zero = 80
Set register in X to zero = 80
Assuming a calculation just uses basic arithmetic operators, then you get
around 30 to 500 FLOPS.
A web-cam goes up to 320x240 at 15 frames/second. You can get Firewire cameras that do 640x480, and mobile phones that go up to 1024x768
A mobile phone eyeball camera might just be the next thing ...
Wouldn't 0,0,0 be where the Borg Queen lived with 17 trillion servants (from First Contact.
The coordinates need not be Cartesian, they could also be Spherical (latitude/longitude/radius). But to have a perfect set of integer values would indicate pre-knowledge of Earth. Maybe the Borg enhanced the V'Ger probe, and it was the first alien device they encountered.
I would imagine it would be like when someone tries to pull several "overnighters" where they work late each night until they are completely mentally exhausted, and end up writing garbage code. They make connections, but the wrong ones, so they end up coming in the next day, looking at the design, and wondering what on earth they were trying to achieve with twenty lines of glue code, when a handful of functions was all that was required.
There was guy who had his hypothalamus destroyed due to ill health. This meant he was unable to remember what he had done 10 minutes ago. Even when he wrote a hourly diary, he still found it impossible to believe that he had been doing anything earlier in the day.
That's strange - just about everyone now I see on public transport is using either touchscreen Blackberry's or mobile phones, especially among this demographic. Being able to view street-maps is the biggest advertised application. Though, it is the van drivers who are the ones who stop and ask passer-bys for directions - they "can't read maps" and just ask for a direction to head towards.
At the time Google came out, there were other search engines like "search.com", "askjeeves.com" and "yahoo.com".
The most important factor was response speed. If the search engine didn't come back within 5 seconds of a result, I would switch to a different engine. Yahoo seemed to be the slowest.
Secondly, if I was looking for information on something, and the search results were junk ie. most usually personal web-pages or sales sites rather than review sites, that would be another reason to switch search engine. If I am looking for 'graphics card', I would expect to find results about hardware, and now art supplies. This seemed to affect 'search.com' and 'yahoo.com'. 'askjeeves.com' seemed to be best at finding where to buy stuff.
Thirdly, I don't want a super-complex query page which would ask for: words-to-search-for, words-to-avoid, phrases-to-search-for, phrase-to-avoid-searching-for, select-languages-to-match, select-countries-to-search, select-cities-in-countries-to-search, select-suburbs-in-cities-to-search or a separate begin-search button that had to be clicked before anything would happen which was then followed by a confirm-that-this-is-what-you-want-to-search-for dialog which also had to be clicked before anything would happen.
Google managed to avoid all of these problems - just type in the words you want, put phrases in double quotes, put words you want to avoid preceded with a minus sign, and precede the domain you want with a 'site:' in front of it. Then just press return.
Maybe you need to understand where their prejudices come from before you can convince them to change their ways.
This probably comes from the fact that many people born in Europe and the USA during the late 1880's didn't get a chance to learn to read or write (their parents were too poor to afford to educate all their children). These were the grandparents of people born in the 1940's (who are in their 60's now). They still remember the humiliation of their grandparents not being able to read a newspaper or book, and having to have everything from prescriptions to department stores catalogs explained to them in spoken word, and how their grandparents could only sign legal documents with a big X. So, being able to read a book or newspaper became a status symbol of an education.
Perhaps the solution to this, is to allow the e-readers to have a touch-sensitive screen so that they can do "intelligent" things like solve crosswords, Sudoku, anagram type games, and use the wireless connection
to enter their answers into online competitions. Presumably the E-reader would be able to support a virtual keyboard?
From the article:
Plastic Logic's new device has an A4 sized display, can be continually updated via a wireless link, and can store and display hundreds of pages of newspapers, books, and documents. Richard Archuleta, the chief executive of Plastic Logic, said the display was sufficiently large enough to match a newspaper's layout. "Even though we have positioned this for business documents, newspapers are what everyone asks for," said Archuleta.
The device has the display size of an A4 sheet of paper. This is the size size as office documents, technical reports, and white papers, or a newspaper folded up to read on the train.
Sun used to have 'ambassadors', sales and marketing people who would be contacted when the large companies like Pixar, Ford and Boeing wanted to make a block purchase of servers and workstations for their new projects. The purchasing companies would compare the performance of the different vendors systems and choose a system based on the performance/price ratio combined with a preferred vendor bias.
But when there is so much more competition from commodity systems purchased from online PC system builders, maybe this doesn't happen now. Desktop systems with Four core Intel/AMD with two/three/four SLI/Crossfire accelerator boards with GigaBytes of memory, 8 GBytes memory and 1000 MBit Ethernet are available at consumer prices.
Either way, it's enough to build a piranha tank with a trap door above. But, unfortunately, the only people that would scare are Oompah-Loompahs and Mini-Me.
Microsoft did attempt to bring out tablet PC's, but that never seemed to take off. Yet just by traveling into downtown and seeing people using netbook PC's and LCD touchscreen mobile phones with Internet access, it is obvious to see the direction the market is going in.
Maybe engineers, artists and developers will want to use the large desktop/workstation screens, but for everyone else, being able to read E-mail, manage their social networking page, watch and upload videos, make online bookings wherever they are seems to be more than enough just now. Maybe being able to run Google Earth and integrate that with their videos, pictures, and social networking page will be the next thing.
Some university courses in the UK have internships (or industrial placements) as they call them. The worst internships (which the university coordinator was determined to avoid), were where a local business director was just looking for a 'bright graduate' to sit in a dark corner doing the work that nobody else had time to do. The best internships were where the student was working in a team and actively helping to specifications and making a contribution to a large real-time systems project.
Anything where you are working in a team, working with current or next-generation technology and helping to design or implement hardware/software will count as good experience. If you have a choice in such placements, then choosing an industry with the best long-term career prospects should be the next priority.
Anything mechanical would add weight, jam or burn out, consume more power, scratch the glass on the solar panels, or make the dust stick to the glass even more. The risks made were worse than the potential gains.
Five or six years ago, a 26" CRT TV cost around 400 pounds ($600). Now, you can buy 32" HD LCD/plasma TV's straight from the supermarket shelf.
The cost of a mobile phone or iPhone is subsided through a contract with the network operator. You sign a three year contract, then the reduction from $400 to $100 is spread through the months at a rate of $8/month.