BTW, the picture is of an EEG cap used for medical research, rather than some super-geeky helmet that lights up acoording to which parts of your brain are in use.
But if you are doing general purpose computing that requires considerable floating-point performance (FFT signal processing, dynamic systems), then you won't be restricted by the refresh rate of the monitor. Both DirectX and OpenGL support floating-point framebuffers. However, for some simulations, you may have less than four floating-point variables per pixel. So just by using three out of four pixel channels, you are just wasting 25% or more of your processsing time. Having scalar processors would seem to be the way to solve this problem.
The bill states that every user must fully identify herself before using the Net, with full name, current address, phone number and the equivalent of the Social Security Number. To access the Net without providing this information, or to give false information, will also be a crime.
Senator Eduardo Azeredo wants to legally recommend every Internet user to buy the government approved certificate, and use it on every connection to the Net.
Ironic - politicians make it an issue to protect children from the Internet, now they are demanding that anyone (including children) using the Internet must give out their personal information including their address and phone number, which is exactly what every parent been told to teach their kids not to do.
How exactly, is this going to work with a family computer - is every person going to have to log out and log back in again, each time someone sits down at the keyboard?
Given that some mobile phones can actually download webpages, you are going to need to store that certificate on your phone. So what if that mobile phone gets stolen?
I know that when i finish uni im going to want to leave the UK and live abroad, and im sure that the people who want to leave USA want to do it for the same reason.
Three hundred thousand people are leaving the UK each year now. The reason most people are leaving are the high cost of housing (especially for retirees), the lack of job and pension security.
Even the immigrate to the UK websites give manage to put a positive spin on it: "high job turnover rate creating opportunities"
Although, there are many reasons which may the UK attractive to people from other countries:
"free state schools attended by over 90% of school-age children with the balance attending private schools."
"world-class free healthcare system available to all."
"welfare: a large welfare system to help you out if one of life's disasters befalls you."
The UK is a great place to live and rent if you are a single professional from a country with a lower cost of living, and want to spend a couple of years putting aside some money for a mortgage. But if you want to buy a house in an area with a good school, then you're going to need a really high salary - Around 50K pounds just to be able afford a house in a area with a good state school. Even more so once the "reevaluation of house prices" is carried out.
I don't mean a better backup tape. I mean something like etching the raw binary info onto metal (or whatever) plates nano-engineering style, or some sort of sturdy media that is potentially readable by an electron microscope. Properly contained, might it last for hundreds of millions of years?
Trying to imagine what happens in a hundred million years. Any metal would eventually either corrode away, be thrown out, looted, melted down, and otherwise recycled.
Your best bet would be take etch it into a holographic crystal and seal that in Amber. At least the worst that would happen is that someone turns it into jewellry. Maybe you could design it as a piece of jewellery and its art value would help preserve it.
The argument the UK government is making against standby features in electronic products, is that it takes the two megawatt power stations to provide 25 million households with enough electricity to keep all these gadgets online (TV , DVD player, set-top box, video-recorder, TiVo, digital-TV decoder). Not including the energy loss in the power lines trying to provide all this electricity.
Banning the standby feature is one way to reduce this requirement - the alternative is to switch everything off- or have a battery backup instead.
It'll force people to use power more wisely - they'll have to do stuff like turn lights off in rooms they're not in, and decide thing like `do I really need 32 devices on `stand-by`` instead of turning them off and incurring a minute or so wait for them to warm up.
What if these devices had an internal battery for maintaining the stand-by circuitry - would that make any difference to power usage? (Make it semi-internal - so that it could be removed/replaced).
I've come to think that it's rather stupid that we think of "intelligence" and "awareness" as mystical disembodied things.
I've always thought intelligence was more about experience/knowledge and pattern matching, rather than some entity.
It always gets to me to hear employers talk about "bright graduates" and "not so bright graduates", when it is simply more a matter of work experience.
This is especially true in the current market where companies have this crazy idea that they should hire somebody who's past experience is an exact match to their current task. The young talent is getting left behind...
I don't know what started companies down this path, but the ones who follow it should be shot.
The most common reasons is that:
(1) they want somebody who knows which basic mistakes to avoid and avoid making them the second time round.
(2) they believe there is no time for someone to carry out the research required. This would include learning various applications, which are the most efficient classes/data types and which are the best API's to use.
(3) Companies do this to try and disrupt one of their competitors. They will know the exact person/people they want and will just keep the position open for those people.
(4) Some managers will want to avoid the career promotion rivalry that goes between a groups of people doing the same job. Promoting one may cause resentment among the others (Usual way to avoid this is to promote people according to years of experience, but what if you have two people with the same amount of experience?).
I know quite a lot of people who really don't want to work for Sony anymore: management is a total mess, it's a paradise if you want to play bullshit bingo
Sounds just like the same experience I had with Sony and an independent company they had bought over . Do you have any further details?
Everything DNA related, shares a common encoding scheme. The following web page explains the basic of amino acid encoding. DNA consists of four nucleotides A, T, C and G. For proteins, triplets of these are used to specify any one of 24 amino acids used. But this could simply be the DNA equivalent of Logo or VHDL (a programming language used to specify silicon chip circuits).
For some organs of the body to grow into complex shapes, some cells have to be pre-programmed to die at the correct time in order for folding to take place. So this has to be encoded in the DNA.
DNA could also be used as the tape of a Turing Machine storing permanent state information (such as which genes are active in a honey bee).
Again, maybe it is because I am from an older generation. Did we have better music then than now?
Music bands became popular through a different way in the past than they do now. In the past (at least in the UK), local nightclubs/pubs would pay local band to play live. This would give them feedback in making their music. From that, they could become famous. Unfortunately, the owners soon realized they were missing out and demanded that groups pay them to be allowed to play. So the music companies have to do the national marketing now...
It's the same in just about every game - even with the platform video games. You could play Super Mario just to complete every level as quickly as possible and not care about collecting every gold star and coin. Alternatively, you could take as long as you liked in order to get every last coin and star. In this case, you would have to know every secret hiding place, combination move and portal.
If you wanted to play those games that have skill levels with high scores but with no save feature, then you would eventually reach a point where the only way to get a new high score was to get a perfect score at the very beginning. Otherwise, there is no point continuing.
Then for those cable TV settop box games with cash prizes, there is a financial incentive for knowing how to win a game, either through skill or AI programming.
My favourite story was when the amusement arcade manufacturers came out with Trivial Pursuit video games for pubs and bars. Initially, revenues were high since the machines were a novelty and the punters didn't get the answers right. Then, paradoxically, (at least to the owners), as the number of punters went up the takings actually went down, until the machines were actually making a loss. Research revealed that the punters had gone down the local library, brushed up on their general knowledge and started to treat the machines as nothing more than pop quiz ATMs to pay for their drinks.
GoldenPalace would sponsor people to get their logo tattooed onto themselves and also to have their logo painted on objects like exotic vehicles and unusual buildings.
Meanwhile, I'm holding out on shaving until they have 20 carbon nanotubes held taut across a razor head with no back (hair wouldn't get caught between the blades as easily). If nanotubes won't work well, nanosheets will do.
Of course, one slip, and you might up cutting off a finger or two...
so God hasn't in fact stopped anyone trying to do anything, he has just stopped them from succeeding which would suggest that it was the success of such an enterprise he was worried about rather than the idea behind its inception.
He should have filed patents and brought patent infringement lawsuit like everyone else.
Planet Earth 1 God, et al. Year 0
Abstract
A tower being is provided for the means of reaching heaven constituted by a plurality of stone columns and support beams positions on top of each other. The tower comprises of an architectural assembly omposed of a large number of levels constructed from stone columns reinforced by stone beams. Each floor may be augmented by mud bricks to provide additional reinforcement against strong winds. Access to each level is provided through either a wooden ladder or a mud bricks staircase.
In some states, I believe that squatters on private property can acquire the title if they can prove they've been living on the property unchallenged for ten years.
It's certainly true in England - a guy managed to gain ownership of a house simply by squatting there for 16 years. Didn't make a nuisance of himself, was polite to everyone and the council didn't find out for 16 years.
It's more than just saying: float framebuffer[1024][1280][4];
The engineers had to resolve the problems of increased video memory bandwidth requirements (512 bits or 64 bytes per pixel) at a 1280x1024 resolution at a consistent 60Hz, and use parallel processing techniques to eliminate major bottlenecks (4 geometry processors built from custom ASIC's, 80 image engines, and texture mapping hardware to support virtual 2048x2048 textures using clipmaps).
SGI owns US Patent #6,650,327, issued November 18, 2003. SGI
believes this patent contains necessary IP for graphics systems
implementing floating point (FP) rasterization and FP framebuffer
capabilities.
SGI's patent was filed June 16, 1998, and granted November 18, 2003
The development history of ATI's document ranges from 9th June 2002 to 4th December 2002
Basically, ATI gets caught between SGI filing for a patent, and SGI having the patent granted. Although, given that SGI have been announcing the status of this patent for the past three years, it does seem odd that they are only sueing now. Maybe they are scared of the ATI/AMD merger, or see that ATI has more money now.
It would be better if this link was at the download sites for Fedora Core.
It's a bit like finding out that the bus/train schedules have been cancelled only when you are trying to get home in the evening, because the company only put the notices on one side of the station doors.
Slashdot Mirror
Is is the inion?
There's also the Occipital bone.
BTW, the picture is of an EEG cap used for medical research, rather than some super-geeky helmet that lights up acoording to which parts of your brain are in use.
But if you are doing general purpose computing that requires considerable floating-point performance (FFT signal processing, dynamic systems), then you won't be restricted by the refresh rate of the monitor. Both DirectX and OpenGL support floating-point framebuffers. However, for some simulations, you may have less than four floating-point variables per pixel. So just by using three out of four pixel channels, you are just wasting 25% or more of your processsing time. Having scalar processors would seem to be the way to solve this problem.
Fax received by admin from on-site engineer:
Manufacturer insists their manufacturing tools have placed the resistor the correct way round.
Their engineers say the entire reference board has been specified backwards.
That's what they are trying to do:
The bill states that every user must fully identify herself before using the Net, with full name, current address, phone number and the equivalent of the Social Security Number. To access the Net without providing this information, or to give false information, will also be a crime.
Senator Eduardo Azeredo wants to legally recommend every Internet user to buy the government approved certificate, and use it on every connection to the Net.
Ironic - politicians make it an issue to protect children from the Internet, now they are demanding that anyone (including children) using the Internet must give out their personal information including their address and phone number, which is exactly what every parent been told to teach their kids not to do.
How exactly, is this going to work with a family computer - is every person going to have to log out and log back in again, each time someone sits down at the keyboard?
Given that some mobile phones can actually download webpages, you are going to need to store that certificate on your phone. So what if that mobile phone gets stolen?
I know that when i finish uni im going to want to leave the UK and live abroad, and im sure that the people who want to leave USA want to do it for the same reason.
Three hundred thousand people are leaving the UK each year now. The reason most people are leaving are the high cost of housing (especially for retirees), the lack of job and pension security.
Even the immigrate to the UK websites give manage to put a positive spin on it: "high job turnover rate creating opportunities"
Although, there are many reasons which may the UK attractive to people from other countries:
"free state schools attended by over 90% of school-age children with the balance attending private schools."
"world-class free healthcare system available to all."
"welfare: a large welfare system to help you out if one of life's disasters befalls you."
The UK is a great place to live and rent if you are a single professional from a country with a lower cost of living, and want to spend a couple of years putting aside some money for a mortgage. But if you want to buy a house in an area with a good school, then you're going to need a really high salary - Around 50K pounds just to be able afford a house in a area with a good state school.
Even more so once the "reevaluation of house prices" is carried out.
I don't mean a better backup tape. I mean something like etching the raw binary info onto metal (or whatever) plates nano-engineering style, or some sort of sturdy media that is potentially readable by an electron microscope. Properly contained, might it last for hundreds of millions of years?
Trying to imagine what happens in a hundred million years. Any metal would eventually either corrode away, be thrown out, looted, melted down, and otherwise recycled.
Your best bet would be take etch it into a holographic crystal and seal that in Amber. At least the worst that would happen is that someone turns it into jewellry. Maybe you could design it as a piece of jewellery and its art value would help preserve it.
The argument the UK government is making against standby features in electronic products, is that it takes the two megawatt power stations to provide 25 million households with enough electricity to keep all these gadgets online (TV , DVD player, set-top box, video-recorder, TiVo, digital-TV decoder). Not including the energy loss in the power lines trying to provide all this electricity.
Banning the standby feature is one way to reduce this requirement - the alternative is to switch everything off- or have a battery backup instead.
It'll force people to use power more wisely - they'll have to do stuff like turn lights off in rooms they're not in, and decide thing like `do I really need 32 devices on `stand-by`` instead of turning them off and incurring a minute or so wait for them to warm up.
What if these devices had an internal battery for maintaining the stand-by circuitry - would that make any difference to power usage? (Make it semi-internal - so that it could be removed/replaced).
No, Psygnosis in Liverpool. Bought out by Sony.
That is the best part of nethack - the number of different combinations. My favourite is "the attorney jingles".
Although, being killed after eating a green slime wasn't fun, especially after getting down to the ghost-town level with all the shades and skeletons.
I've come to think that it's rather stupid that we think of "intelligence" and "awareness" as mystical disembodied things.
I've always thought intelligence was more about experience/knowledge and pattern matching, rather than some entity.
It always gets to me to hear employers talk about "bright graduates" and "not so bright graduates", when it is simply more a matter of work experience.
This is especially true in the current market where companies have this crazy idea that they should hire somebody who's past experience is an exact match to their current task. The young talent is getting left behind...
I don't know what started companies down this path, but the ones who follow it should be shot.
The most common reasons is that:
(1) they want somebody who knows which basic mistakes to avoid and avoid making them the second time round.
(2) they believe there is no time for someone to carry out the research required. This would include learning various applications, which are the most efficient classes/data types and which are the best API's to use.
(3) Companies do this to try and disrupt one of their competitors. They will know the exact person/people they want and will just keep the position open for those people.
(4) Some managers will want to avoid the career promotion rivalry that goes between a groups of people doing the same job. Promoting one may cause resentment among the others (Usual way to avoid this is to promote people according to years of experience, but what if you have two people with the same amount of experience?).
I know quite a lot of people who really don't want to work for Sony anymore: management is a total mess, it's a paradise if you want to play bullshit bingo
Sounds just like the same experience I had with Sony and an independent company they had bought over . Do you have any further details?
Everything DNA related, shares a common encoding scheme. The following web page explains the basic of amino acid encoding. DNA consists of four nucleotides A, T, C and G. For proteins, triplets of these are used to specify any one of 24 amino acids used. But this could simply be the DNA equivalent of Logo or VHDL (a programming language used to specify silicon chip circuits).
For some organs of the body to grow into complex shapes, some cells have to be pre-programmed to die at the correct time in order for folding to take place. So this has to be encoded in the DNA.
DNA could also be used as the tape of a Turing Machine storing permanent state information (such as which genes are active in a honey bee).
Again, maybe it is because I am from an older generation. Did we have better music then than now?
Music bands became popular through a different way in the past than they do now. In the past (at least in the UK), local nightclubs/pubs would pay local band to play live. This would give them feedback in making their music. From that, they could become famous. Unfortunately, the owners soon realized they were missing out and demanded that groups pay them to be allowed to play. So the music companies have to do the national marketing now...
A woman managed to board an international flight using only her storecard as proof of identity instead of a passport...
passenger used her costco card to get on flight
It's the same in just about every game - even with the platform video games. You could play Super Mario just to complete every level as quickly as possible and not care about collecting every gold star and coin. Alternatively, you could take as long as you liked in order to get every last coin and star. In this case, you would have to know every secret hiding place, combination move and portal.
If you wanted to play those games that have skill levels with high scores but with no save feature, then you would eventually reach a point where the only way to get a new high score was to get a perfect score at the very beginning. Otherwise, there is no point continuing.
Then for those cable TV settop box games with cash prizes, there is a financial incentive for knowing how to win a game, either through skill or AI programming.
My favourite story was when the amusement arcade manufacturers came out with Trivial Pursuit video games for pubs and bars. Initially, revenues were high since the machines were a novelty and the punters didn't get the answers right. Then, paradoxically, (at least to the owners), as the number of punters went up the takings actually went down, until the machines were actually making a loss. Research revealed that the punters had gone down the local library, brushed up on their general knowledge and started to treat the machines as nothing more than pop quiz ATMs to pay for their drinks.
GoldenPalace would sponsor people to get their logo tattooed onto themselves and also to have their logo painted on objects like exotic vehicles and unusual buildings.
So you could have the GoldenPalace telescope.
Meanwhile, I'm holding out on shaving until they have 20 carbon nanotubes held taut across a razor head with no back (hair wouldn't get caught between the blades as easily). If nanotubes won't work well, nanosheets will do.
Of course, one slip, and you might up cutting off a finger or two...
He should have filed patents and brought patent infringement lawsuit like everyone else.
In some states, I believe that squatters on private property can acquire the title if they can prove they've been living on the property unchallenged for ten years.
It's certainly true in England - a guy managed to gain ownership of a house simply by squatting there for 16 years. Didn't make a nuisance of himself, was polite to everyone and the council didn't find out for 16 years.
The research paper InfiniteReality: a real-time graphics system provides some clues as to why.
It's more than just saying:
float framebuffer[1024][1280][4];
The engineers had to resolve the problems of increased video memory bandwidth requirements (512 bits or 64 bytes per pixel) at a 1280x1024 resolution at a consistent 60Hz, and use parallel processing techniques to eliminate major bottlenecks (4 geometry processors built from custom ASIC's, 80 image engines, and texture mapping hardware to support virtual 2048x2048 textures using clipmaps).
SGI's patent was filed June 16, 1998, and granted November 18, 2003
ATI did similar work at the same time ATI_pixel_format_float
The development history of ATI's document ranges from 9th June 2002 to 4th December 2002
Basically, ATI gets caught between SGI filing for a patent, and SGI having the patent granted. Although, given that SGI have been announcing the status of this patent for the past three years, it does seem odd that they are only sueing now. Maybe they are scared of the ATI/AMD merger, or see that ATI has more money now.
Been there - done that!
It would be better if this link was at the download sites for Fedora Core.
It's a bit like finding out that the bus/train schedules have been cancelled only when you are trying to get home in the evening, because the company only put the notices on one side of the station doors.
You must be eaten by the snake first, then the crocodile eats the snake. Otherwise, if the snake eats the crocodile, the curse comes to a messy end
Of course, you could be required to eat every last part of both the snake and crocodile. That sounds the worst of all possible six combinations.