Yes, String Theory research will be replaced by Tangled Shoelace Theory - the theory that the space-time continuum is in fact a giant cosmic tangle of shoelaces, and that these shoelaces only get untangled in the presence of a large gravitational object, thus causing space-time curvature. In the presence of a massively strong gravitational object such as a black hole, these shoelaces actually break in half, with one half going into the black hole and the other half left dangling in this universe. Thus we see no light as all the shoelaces are now in a tightly tangled ball that has no connection to this universe.
I'm still waiting for a context modifier for keywords, so when you type something like 'mechanics:teeth' you get all the technical matches for gears, and when you type 'medicine:teeth' you would get all the medical matches for dentistry.
Look at the power-sharing agreement in Zimbabwe. The ZPF party give themselves the ministerial positions for the police force, the army and international relations, while giving the MDC the education, research, health, cultural arts and agricultural ministerial positions. The response by MDC is to claim that ZPF have "all the good jobs".
One of the UK's beer companies used to help sell their cans by having pictures of models on the side. At the time, it was just an beer can with a picture of a model, but now these pictures capture the fashions of the era, that would be hard for any designer to reproduce without having reference pictures ( 1980's.
Now these beer cans are actually collectors items.
Translucent means "allows photons through, but not in a straight line". This means, all the light travelling through becomes diffused and blurred. Every photon may get through, but just not in the direction it started from. Just like those clear plastic folders used to protect sheets of paper in ring binders. Pressed against the paper, you can see the paper clearly. Lift the plastic cover up, and you can't see the text on the paper.
It is the same everywhere. Every region lives in its own reality bubble, where small local events will always get more coverage than small or even major events in other regions and cities.
The fact that local shopkeepers are losing trade due to new parking restrictions will always seem to be more important than the large city 40 miles away getting a corporation to relocate their corporate headquarters.
The best one was "Ghostwatch" by the BBC, which was broadcast as a reality TV show, but in fact was a fiction horror movie. Using presenters (Michael Parkinson) from serious shows such as "Crimewatch", they convinced a good percentage of the British population that this was a reality TV show. Only in the last 15 minutes, did they have children speaking in tongues, the female presenter disappear, and the studio presenter become possessed.
The jury found Stevens guilty of "knowingly and willfully" scheming to conceal on Senate disclosure forms more than $250,000 in home renovations and other gifts from an Alaska-based oil industry contractor.
Stevens faces a maximum sentence of up to to 35 years in prison -- five years for each of the seven counts.
The contractor is VECO, who wanted to build a gas pipeline from Alaska
Been there are well. My primary school teacher was running a classroom team pop quiz, picking students at random, asking a question and awarding points if the answer is correct.
Teacher. "Where do we buy apples and oranges from?"
Me: "The supermarket?"
Classroom is filled with laughter...
Teacher: After calming the classroom down, "No, the greengrocer. No points."
It still happens now. When students were asked "Where does milk come from?", many would answer, "the supermarket."
Back in the 1980's, the BBC produced a Horizon documentary, which covered the growth of Silicon Valley. The first company was Fairchild Semiconductor, which then formed many offshoot companies, and that tradition continued until there were hundreds of companies. In many cases, research funding was provided to the universities to solve various problems, which then allowed the students and staff to set up their own companies once the project was finished.
For older definitions of supercomputer, you're probably carrying one in your pocket. At this rate, it'll be a little chip under my watch in ten years.
You can already get mobile phone watches (CECT M800 and others), which have 2 Gigabytes of memory, have Bluetooth capability and which can both record and play mp3/mp4 files, along with using WAP internet access. There's even a watch with Wi-FI detection built in.
There would always be the hazard that they would end up flying in circles or crash into the ground. If birds really do have 'magnetic vision' then that would prevent the first problem. If they can accurately determine changes in velocity, then that would avoid the second problem. But then, how would they avoid flying into each other? Someone has to keep their eyes open.
It is incredible to see and read about what the Black Plague did to Europe. France lost half their population that way. Even now, there are still thousands of abandoned properties (houses, cottages, villas) all of which cannot be re-inhabited due to Napoleonic laws governing the redistribution of wealth - when somebody dies, every relative inherits a share of the home. Unless every relative gives their consent to the sale (which depends upon every person in the family tree being traceable), the property cannot be sold, so it just becomes a ruin.
Even death became a art form, with so many statues, engravings and carvings featuring the grim reaper and skeletons.
Wasn't something like this on TV some time ago. They had several bomb disposal robots chassis reconfigured with several different sets of cameras (infra-red, wide-angle, zoom lens, rear-view), and a mounting point for a rifle with zoom optics.
Previous slashdotters had suggested that the best defence would be to tip the robots over, build some ground-traps or hide in a river.
I noticed that when playing any sort of 'civilisation' or empire building game like 'dope wars'. It's always intuitive as to how you can make money to buy things, but when you try doing that in the real world, it's not so easy. While you can go around fields looking for gold with a metal-detector any large treasure becomes the property of the state.
If you want a shop to sell stuff, you have to put together a business loan, approach a bank to get a loan, sign a lease, buy the stuff you want to sell at wholesale prices, then make the sales, handle tax returns, conform to employment and anti-discrimination legislation if you want to employ other people.
There's a whole load of planning codes even out in the sticks. If your home is built out of traditional materials (thatched roofs with straw or oak beams with plaster), you will have to use the exact same materials and colors otherwise you will be served with a court order to restore the property. Some councils even get picky about people restoring 19th century golf courses, ruins or walls.
Some cities will even require you to use an exact color of paint (Brunswick square in Brighton).
It amazes me how the UK ever managed to achieved the Industrial revolution. If we had laws like we had now, there would be a public enquiry for every canal, factory, paper mill, warehouse or associated row of terraced townhouses.
Side note: Why do you think people in the past have chosen to leave over fixing what is wrong with their governments?
In England (if not Europe) at the time of the settlers, you had a feudal system with all the land owned by someone and titles granted by the king. Even in the rural villages, what personal freedoms the crown didn't decide, the church would dictate (Even failing to attend church on a Sunday would result in a fine). There wasn't anywhere where you could try and set up your "alternative way of living" without having to get permission from one authority or another to acquire land, employ builders or farmers.
Tell me why an OS shouldn't be making use of resources as they become available and cheap.
I have never understood the Geek's obsession with RAM.
Compatibility with embedded systems. I had a electrical engineering professor who had spent his career on optimizing software for embedded systems like sonar systems. When he marked coursework assignments, he would deduct points for any byte, word that wasn't used for storing data. This was with CPU's that had no penalty for reading bytes, words instead of 32-bit integers.
Some students would just use the default integer data type to represent a Boolean variable, regardless of the overall size of the variable. For a single data item, there go three bytes wasted. Then turn that into a array of N elements - there go N*3 bytes wasted. Now consider what happens when they implement a highlighting algorithm for a 128x128x128 volume with a tag for every voxel. With a 32-bit integer for every voxel, you need 2 MBytes. Using 1 bit per voxel, you only need 64K.
Even on a desktop system, that 64K would fit right in the CPU cache. With 2 MBytes, the CPU will be constantly swapping memory in and out of cache.
The other crime was to get libraries dynamically and statically linked in when they were never actually used. This was most commonly done by using the odd argc/argv argument to run a test routine. These were expected to be #ifdef'ed out of use.
These days, resources are wasted through pre-installed applications and device drivers that are never used, but are there just in case you might need to use them in the future.
The first PC's came out in the mid 1980's - they had 4.77 Mhz 8088 CPU with a 10 MByte hard disk drive, CGA/EGA video cards, and cost around $3000.
PC's in the late 1980's were 20 MHz 80286's with 40 MByte hard disk drives, VGA video cards.
PC's in the early 1990's were 100 Mhz 80386's with 200 MByte hard disk drives and PC's in the late 1990's were 500 MHz Pentium III's with 40 Gigabyte hard disk drives, and SVGA video cards.
I'm looking at top end PC's now - it is amazing what is on offer: quad-core 3Ghz with 4 GB memory, 1 GByte video card, 500 GByte hard disk drive, 1000 Gigabit Ethernet. The only limitation seems to be the 32-bit addressing space of the CPU.
I remember seeing an HP server like that. On the left side was the large hard disk drive - on the right were the server processors - both kept off the floor but mounted into the frame where drawers would have been. On top of the desk was the monitor.
Just post their website here - the sheer curiosity of a million slashdotters will flatten their servers faster than a horde of Mongol warriors on horseback.
For a high-performance system with a large number of nodes, the cost of the actual network to connect everything together can cost more than the CPU's and servers themselves. To get high performance from this network, everything has to be tied so tightly together, that is is considered a component in itself, the network fabric. Also, the actual communication through the network cables is the slowest part of the system. So this price/performance ratio is what customers will be considering when buying a system.
The vendors want to keep the cheap network hardware (cables, connectors, switches) because the consumer market has driven down costs down to commodity prices. But Ethernet uses the cheapest method of shared communication - packet collision detection ("keep shouting until someone hears you"). I've read some research papers which say they can get up to 90% efficiency now.
High performance network architectures (FDDI, token ring) are a bit more civilized - they had a token that was passed around - only the machine with the token could send any data. So there was never any lost packets. Other methods give each pair of devices a unique time-slot on a multi-slice basis. Or there are crossbar switch architectures like telephone exchanges that allow multiple connections to exist at the same time.
So the vendors want it both ways - the cheap commodity prices of Ethernet hardware, combined with the high efficiency of existing high-end network hardware.
The changes that they want only really affects the Link layer of TCP/IP, where collision detection is currently being performed instead of token passing or sychnronised time-slicing.
I lived in Canada and Silicon Valley - it amazed me how apartment-owners built multi-floor apartment blocks, yet had all the washing and drying machines down in the basement. While it avoids flood damage (pipes leak, seals break, pumps burn out) it only helped to increase crime because renters would tend to forget to lock their apartment doors when carrying a full basket of laundry. Even small privately owned apartment blocks would have a single washer/dryer in the basement.
With the large apartment blocks, the washer/dryers would be coin operated. Everyone kept a glass jar of quarters for every washday ($1 for washing whites or non-whites, 75c for drying). There was a 24-hour supermarket on the block, but on a Sunday night, they would refuse to exchange dollars for quarters as every cash till had exchanged them all.
My current apartment block has a combined dryer/washer in every apartment. But with the chipboard floors it often sounds like your upstairs neighbor is running a speedboat motor repair shop.
Slashdot Mirror
Collision between a 1500 lb demolition ball and a car
Yes, String Theory research will be replaced by Tangled Shoelace Theory - the theory that the space-time continuum is in fact a giant cosmic tangle of shoelaces, and that these shoelaces only get untangled in the presence of a large gravitational object, thus causing space-time curvature. In the presence of a massively strong gravitational object such as a black hole, these shoelaces actually break in half, with one half going into the black hole and the other half left dangling in this universe. Thus we see no light as all the shoelaces are now in a tightly tangled ball that has no connection to this universe.
I'm still waiting for a context modifier for keywords, so when you type something like 'mechanics:teeth' you get all the technical matches for gears, and when you type 'medicine:teeth' you would get all the medical matches for dentistry.
Look at the power-sharing agreement in Zimbabwe. The ZPF party give themselves the ministerial positions for the police force, the army and international relations, while giving the MDC the education, research, health, cultural arts and agricultural ministerial positions. The response by MDC is to claim that ZPF have "all the good jobs".
One of the UK's beer companies used to help sell their cans by having pictures of models on the side. At the time, it was just an beer can with a picture of a model, but now these pictures capture the fashions of the era, that would be hard for any designer to reproduce without having reference pictures ( 1980's.
Now these beer cans are actually collectors items.
Translucent means "allows photons through, but not in a straight line". This means, all the light travelling through becomes diffused and blurred. Every photon may get through, but just not in the direction it started from. Just like those clear plastic folders used to protect sheets of paper in ring binders. Pressed against the paper, you can see the paper clearly. Lift the plastic cover up, and you can't see the text on the paper.
It is the same everywhere. Every region lives in its own reality bubble, where small local events will always get more coverage than small or even major events in other regions and cities.
The fact that local shopkeepers are losing trade due to new parking restrictions will always seem to be more important than the large city 40 miles away getting a corporation to relocate their corporate headquarters.
The best one was "Ghostwatch" by the BBC, which was broadcast as a reality TV show, but in fact was a fiction horror movie. Using presenters (Michael Parkinson) from serious shows such as "Crimewatch", they convinced a good percentage of the British population that this was a reality TV show. Only in the last 15 minutes, did they have children speaking in tongues, the female presenter disappear, and the studio presenter become possessed.
A total of 35 years:
The jury found Stevens guilty of "knowingly and willfully" scheming to conceal on Senate disclosure forms more than $250,000 in home renovations and other gifts from an Alaska-based oil industry contractor.
Stevens faces a maximum sentence of up to to 35 years in prison -- five years for each of the seven counts.
The contractor is VECO, who wanted to build a gas pipeline from Alaska
Been there are well. My primary school teacher was running a classroom team pop quiz, picking students at random, asking a question and awarding points if the answer is correct.
Teacher. "Where do we buy apples and oranges from?"
Me: "The supermarket?"
Classroom is filled with laughter ...
Teacher: After calming the classroom down, "No, the greengrocer. No points."
It still happens now. When students were asked "Where does milk come from?", many would answer, "the supermarket."
Back in the 1980's, the BBC produced a Horizon documentary, which covered the growth of Silicon Valley. The first company was Fairchild Semiconductor, which then formed many offshoot companies, and that tradition continued until there were hundreds of companies. In many cases, research funding was provided to the universities to solve various problems, which then allowed the students and staff to set up their own companies once the project was finished.
For older definitions of supercomputer, you're probably carrying one in your pocket. At this rate, it'll be a little chip under my watch in ten years.
You can already get mobile phone watches (CECT M800 and others), which have 2 Gigabytes of memory, have Bluetooth capability and which can both record and play mp3/mp4 files, along with using WAP internet access. There's even a watch with Wi-FI detection built in.
There would always be the hazard that they would end up flying in circles or crash into the ground. If birds really do have 'magnetic vision' then that would prevent the first problem. If they can accurately determine changes in velocity, then that would avoid the second problem.
But then, how would they avoid flying into each other? Someone has to keep their eyes open.
It is incredible to see and read about what the Black Plague did to Europe. France lost half their population that way. Even now, there are still thousands of abandoned properties (houses, cottages, villas) all of which cannot be re-inhabited due to Napoleonic laws governing the redistribution of wealth - when somebody dies, every relative inherits a share of the home. Unless every relative gives their consent to the sale (which depends upon every person in the family tree being traceable), the property cannot be sold, so it just becomes a ruin.
Even death became a art form, with so many statues, engravings and carvings featuring the grim reaper and skeletons.
Wasn't something like this on TV some time ago. They had several bomb disposal robots chassis reconfigured with several different sets of cameras (infra-red, wide-angle, zoom lens, rear-view), and a mounting point for a rifle with zoom optics.
Previous slashdotters had suggested that the best defence would be to tip the robots over, build some ground-traps or hide in a river.
I noticed that when playing any sort of 'civilisation' or empire building game like 'dope wars'. It's always intuitive as to how you can make money to buy things, but when you try doing that in the real world, it's not so easy. While you can go around fields looking for gold with a metal-detector any large treasure becomes the property of the state.
If you want a shop to sell stuff, you have to put together a business loan, approach a bank to get a loan, sign a lease, buy the stuff you want to sell at wholesale prices, then make the sales, handle tax returns, conform to employment and anti-discrimination legislation if you want to employ other people.
There's a whole load of planning codes even out in the sticks. If your home is built out of traditional materials (thatched roofs with straw or oak beams with plaster), you will have to use the exact same materials and colors otherwise you will be served with a court order to restore the property. Some councils even get picky about people restoring 19th century golf courses, ruins or walls.
Some cities will even require you to use an exact color of paint (Brunswick square in Brighton).
It amazes me how the UK ever managed to achieved the Industrial revolution. If we had laws like we had now, there would be a public enquiry for every canal, factory, paper mill, warehouse or associated row of terraced townhouses.
That is sort of what I meant - the first Intel PC's that I used were the PC-XT's in 1986.
Side note: Why do you think people in the past have chosen to leave over fixing what is wrong with their governments?
In England (if not Europe) at the time of the settlers, you had a feudal system with all the land owned by someone and titles granted by the king. Even in the rural villages, what personal freedoms the crown didn't decide, the church would dictate (Even failing to attend church on a Sunday would result in a fine). There wasn't anywhere where you could try and set up your "alternative way of living" without having to get permission from one authority or another to acquire land, employ builders or farmers.
Inside temperature or outside temperature?
About 4.654187 sudden cold Winter snaps in Washington DC.
Tell me why an OS shouldn't be making use of resources as they become available and cheap.
I have never understood the Geek's obsession with RAM.
Compatibility with embedded systems. I had a electrical engineering professor who had spent his career on optimizing software for embedded systems like sonar systems.
When he marked coursework assignments, he would deduct points for any byte, word that wasn't used for storing data. This was with CPU's that had no penalty for reading bytes, words instead of 32-bit integers.
Some students would just use the default integer data type to represent a Boolean variable, regardless of the overall size of the variable.
For a single data item, there go three bytes wasted.
Then turn that into a array of N elements - there go N*3 bytes wasted.
Now consider what happens when they implement a highlighting algorithm for a 128x128x128 volume with a tag for every voxel. With a 32-bit integer for every voxel, you need 2 MBytes. Using 1 bit per voxel, you only need 64K.
Even on a desktop system, that 64K would fit right in the CPU cache. With 2 MBytes, the CPU will be constantly swapping memory in and out of cache.
The other crime was to get libraries dynamically and statically linked in when they were never actually used. This was most commonly done by using the odd argc/argv argument to run a test routine. These were expected to be #ifdef'ed out of use.
These days, resources are wasted through pre-installed applications and device drivers that are never used, but are there just in case you might need to use them in the future.
The first PC's came out in the mid 1980's - they had 4.77 Mhz 8088 CPU with a 10 MByte hard disk drive, CGA/EGA video cards, and cost around $3000.
PC's in the late 1980's were 20 MHz 80286's with 40 MByte hard disk drives, VGA video cards.
PC's in the early 1990's were 100 Mhz 80386's with 200 MByte hard disk drives and
PC's in the late 1990's were 500 MHz Pentium III's with 40 Gigabyte hard disk drives, and SVGA video cards.
Animations which were rendered using a supercomputer in real-time back in the 1990' can now be animated in real-time on a single PC.
I'm looking at top end PC's now - it is amazing what is on offer: quad-core 3Ghz with 4 GB memory, 1 GByte video card, 500 GByte hard disk drive, 1000 Gigabit Ethernet. The only limitation seems to be the 32-bit addressing space of the CPU.
I remember seeing an HP server like that. On the left side was the large hard disk drive - on the right were the server processors - both kept off the floor but mounted into the frame where drawers would have been. On top of the desk was the monitor.
Just post their website here - the sheer curiosity of a million slashdotters will flatten their servers faster than a horde of Mongol warriors on horseback.
For a high-performance system with a large number of nodes, the cost of the actual network to connect everything together can cost more than the CPU's and servers themselves. To get high performance from this network, everything has to be tied so tightly together, that is is considered a component in itself, the network fabric. Also, the actual communication through the network cables is the slowest part of the system. So this price/performance ratio is what customers will be considering when buying a system.
The vendors want to keep the cheap network hardware (cables, connectors, switches) because the consumer market has driven down costs down to commodity prices. But Ethernet uses the cheapest method of shared communication - packet collision detection ("keep shouting until someone hears you"). I've read some research papers which say they can get up to 90% efficiency now.
High performance network architectures (FDDI, token ring) are a bit more civilized - they had a token that was passed around - only the machine with the token could send any data.
So there was never any lost packets. Other methods give each pair of devices a unique time-slot on a multi-slice basis. Or there are crossbar switch architectures like telephone exchanges that allow multiple connections to exist at the same time.
So the vendors want it both ways - the cheap commodity prices of Ethernet hardware, combined with the high efficiency of existing high-end network hardware.
The changes that they want only really affects the Link layer of TCP/IP, where collision detection is currently being performed instead of token passing or sychnronised time-slicing.
I lived in Canada and Silicon Valley - it amazed me how apartment-owners built multi-floor apartment blocks, yet had all the washing and drying machines down in the basement. While it avoids flood damage (pipes leak, seals break, pumps burn out) it only helped to increase crime because renters would tend to forget to lock their apartment doors when carrying a full basket of laundry. Even small privately owned apartment blocks would have a single washer/dryer in the basement.
With the large apartment blocks, the washer/dryers would be coin operated. Everyone kept a glass jar of quarters for every washday ($1 for washing whites or non-whites, 75c for drying). There was a 24-hour supermarket on the block, but on a Sunday night, they would refuse to exchange dollars for quarters as every cash till had exchanged them all.
My current apartment block has a combined dryer/washer in every apartment. But with the chipboard floors it often sounds like your upstairs neighbor is running a speedboat motor repair shop.