Yeah, but the concept that the reproduction is "free" is a fallacy too. Sure sex doesn't cost anything sometimes (just look at breeding prices though), but you still have to raise, feed, and most importantly, train your new horse before you can use it. That's hundreds of man hours, man hours that are not free. You have to start early too. Just ask anybody who handles horses what they would think about training a wild horse you've let run free.
A buddy of mine has a Series 1 where he apparently installed this big drive cache (1GB of memory on some sort of special board) that allows his Tivo to keep the entire guide in memory instead of having to swap it in and out. Because of this, his menu is lightning fast and stuff like adding a season pass or reordering shows is way way (minutes) faster. He has the network card too because he dumped his landline awhile back and needed a way to get the guide updates. I don't know if he can still grab videos off of it though.
A $1000? Do you shop exclusively at Alienware? Assuming you can reuse your HDD, Optical Drive, Case, Power Supply (might be iffy depending on what you currently have), Monitor, Keyboard, and Mouse, and any other PCI cards you might already have; you can build a very decent Core2Duo system for $500. You won't be using a 790i or a 9800GX2, but there's no way you should be hitting $1000 if you make sane price/performance tradeoffs.
I mean you're replacing the Motherboard (~$100), CPU (~$100), Memory (~$100), and Graphics card ($200). Those numbers are very rough too, you could play around quite a bit with them (Get a $175 graphics card to upgrade the CPU for example). Your system won't be a slouch either. It'll be something like a Core2Duo E4500, 2GB Memory, a motherboard with built-in ethernet, sound (unless you already have a sound card), firewire, etc... a Geforce 9600 and all of the peripherals you already have.
It really depends on how "super" your super horse is. The armor upgrade kit for the HMMWV weighs 1.326 tons. If your horse is strong enough to handle that sort of weight without slowing down or tiring out too quickly, then yeah, that'll make sense.
Frankly, the whole Horse vs. HMMWV argument sounds a lot like someone only looking at one side of the coin. Horses can't carry nearly as much weight, require constant maintenance (you can park a HMMWV in a garage for a month, leave it alone, and it'll be fine), are fickle, need to be rested on a regular basis, require long recuperation periods after injuries, spook easily, offer no protection for the rider, are relatively slow, etc...
I don't know if it's true, but I heard awhile back that Horses generally can only put out about 3/4 of a horsepower. Turns out when they were defining the spec the farmer lied about his horse.
On one side letting some random person install any old IRC client is just asking for the office machine to be owned eventually. On the other hand, I hate the idea of being a no good outlaw just because I want to use vim instead of notepad for text editing.
Heh, I was one of those people. It looks like I might do the same thing with Vista, especially since my machine has a bunch of older hardware in it that probably has not had a driver update for Vista (not that I've looked really hard yet). Given how some of it was barely supported in XP (BT878 based capture card for instance), I don't have high hopes.
Well, that and my ISP doesn't route IPv6 traffic, so if I wanted to use it I'd have to tunnel over IPv4, and that's just pointless complexity I don't really need in my network. If my ISP supported IPv6 I'd turn it on even though, as mentioned in the article, trying to use IPv6 on the current internet tends to break stuff and add delays to other things.
If you go back and read the criteria for the Turing test you'll discover that one of the conditions of the test is that the conversation could be restricted to a single area of interest, thus asking "what does coffee taste like" would be outside of the bounds of the test unless you were specifically talking about coffee.
Anyway, a better argument is that the Turing test was passed ages ago, but it's not a very good test for intelligence. The biggest problem is that it requires the human on the other end of the line to make the judgment and humans are not particularly good judges of intelligence.
I'd say #3 is probably already in the works, but it takes time for people to get the production going with stuff like that. The price of oil has skyrocketed so fast that new producers have not had a chance to get started yet. Also, there are some of them that are a bit gun shy from when they tried this in the 80s and lost their shirt when the price of oil collapsed. Although I don't see how yet, it is certainly possible that the price of oil could go back down in a couple of years.
As far as random access on a drive is concerned, a 5MB music file is gigantic. The seek time (1 seek every 3-4 minutes) is a non-issue. If you were playing 20 snippits of different songs every second then it might matter, but for MP3 playing it is not an issue at all. Even if your file gets fragmented for some reason you're only going to be talking about a few dozen seeks at most.
That said, flash does have a bunch of advantages for music players. It's far more shock resistant (for running!), requires less power, and doesn't have to constantly be put to sleep and woken up like spinning magnetic media.
Ironically, last time I got stopped by airport security was because I had a hard drive in my case. Apparently the hard drive looked like a bomb on the x-ray and it freaked the TSA lady out. It's never a good sign when three armed guards come running at you from three different directions. Luckily all they had to do was run my bag through the chemical sniffer, there was no waiting for guards to try to figure it out on their own like in the OP.
Bah, Slashdot has been acting weird for me. He's the second half of my post:
This is a good example of where bad ideas come from. A person has a vested interest in proving someone wrong, and they want them to be wrong so very very much, that they half listen to the theories and then immediately (usually before the speaker finishes talking) attempt to poke holes in it. If they find what they think is a hole, they will latch on to that and repeat it every time someone mentions the speaker's topic. It's not only real scientists that have to deal with that. If you ever read the Mythbusters fan boards (for instance) you will see dozens of examples of this (from people who apparently watch about a third of the episode) for every single show, especially from people who really believe the busted myth.
Yes, but the OP missed the point entirely. You don't reduce your carbon emission to 0, rather you offset all of the carbon you emit with some form of carbon capture (normally plant material). In the end, you subtract all of the carbon you sequester from the carbon you emit and try to get the sum to 0 (or less than zero!).
No. This story has been around for awhile and it drives me crazy. We're talking about quantities like 3 parts per trillion on most drugs. It is far far below (many orders of magnitude!) the point at which it would do anything to you, yet so many people seem to nearly panic at the idea of drugs in the water.
I'm just waiting for the study on air to come out.
Back when I took graphics in college, it was made abundantly clear that all modern graphics are just large math problems solved in realtime. We did all sorts of work messing with transformation matrices and doing the math (sadly, since this was done by the CS department we did a lot less of the useful stuff and a lot more of the theoretical underpinnings that you don't technically need to know when actually programming something).
Anyway, the point is that Excel is reasonably well set up for doing the kind of math you need to do when making computer graphics and has vector output capabilities. It's a neat trick and something that would likely be useful in teaching the underpinnings (watching what happens as you tweak variables in a transformation matrix in realtime would have been very nice when I was taking my class).
Windows 3.1 was only crash free until you started running applications on it. After that all bets were off. Installing anything but the most standard hardware (cpu, memory, motherboard, keyboard, mouse) could be a problem too, especially with things that required more than a minimal amount of driver support (like sound cards).
Even if this were practical for large businesses like the old pneumatic tube system in NYC, there is no way it would be practical for someone to dig it out to every home in the area for a handful of deliveries per month at the most. Digging tunnels is expensive and time consuming.
The best you could hope for is to have it dug to the basement of a large apartment complex.
I think the parent was more referring to getting some sort of speech to text system running (with a lousy input since the cellphone will be on your belt/purse/pocket and muffled) constantly on a cell phone without draining the battery in a couple of hours. Speech to Text is wildly expensive processor wise for a cell phone, especially if it's not just matching against a handful of known patterns. The other option (keeping a hidden "call" up to send back somewhere for processing) wouldn't work at all with our current cell architecture, the whole system is designed under the assumption that only a few people are ever using their cell phone in a single cell at any one time. Plus, SMS messages wouldn't work if you had a call up 24/7, and your battery would be dead in a few hours.
Yes, I mean Jesus Christ, can you imagine how mad I would be if playing back an simple audio file didn't eat up 15% of my CPU (up from 0.5% in XP)? I know I might lose the ability to play back HD movies that I can't play back anyway because media companies still don't trust me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but the concept that the reproduction is "free" is a fallacy too. Sure sex doesn't cost anything sometimes (just look at breeding prices though), but you still have to raise, feed, and most importantly, train your new horse before you can use it. That's hundreds of man hours, man hours that are not free. You have to start early too. Just ask anybody who handles horses what they would think about training a wild horse you've let run free.
A buddy of mine has a Series 1 where he apparently installed this big drive cache (1GB of memory on some sort of special board) that allows his Tivo to keep the entire guide in memory instead of having to swap it in and out. Because of this, his menu is lightning fast and stuff like adding a season pass or reordering shows is way way (minutes) faster. He has the network card too because he dumped his landline awhile back and needed a way to get the guide updates. I don't know if he can still grab videos off of it though.
A $1000? Do you shop exclusively at Alienware? Assuming you can reuse your HDD, Optical Drive, Case, Power Supply (might be iffy depending on what you currently have), Monitor, Keyboard, and Mouse, and any other PCI cards you might already have; you can build a very decent Core2Duo system for $500. You won't be using a 790i or a 9800GX2, but there's no way you should be hitting $1000 if you make sane price/performance tradeoffs.
I mean you're replacing the Motherboard (~$100), CPU (~$100), Memory (~$100), and Graphics card ($200). Those numbers are very rough too, you could play around quite a bit with them (Get a $175 graphics card to upgrade the CPU for example). Your system won't be a slouch either. It'll be something like a Core2Duo E4500, 2GB Memory, a motherboard with built-in ethernet, sound (unless you already have a sound card), firewire, etc... a Geforce 9600 and all of the peripherals you already have.
It really depends on how "super" your super horse is. The armor upgrade kit for the HMMWV weighs 1.326 tons. If your horse is strong enough to handle that sort of weight without slowing down or tiring out too quickly, then yeah, that'll make sense.
Frankly, the whole Horse vs. HMMWV argument sounds a lot like someone only looking at one side of the coin. Horses can't carry nearly as much weight, require constant maintenance (you can park a HMMWV in a garage for a month, leave it alone, and it'll be fine), are fickle, need to be rested on a regular basis, require long recuperation periods after injuries, spook easily, offer no protection for the rider, are relatively slow, etc...
I don't know if it's true, but I heard awhile back that Horses generally can only put out about 3/4 of a horsepower. Turns out when they were defining the spec the farmer lied about his horse.
On one side letting some random person install any old IRC client is just asking for the office machine to be owned eventually. On the other hand, I hate the idea of being a no good outlaw just because I want to use vim instead of notepad for text editing.
Heh, I was one of those people. It looks like I might do the same thing with Vista, especially since my machine has a bunch of older hardware in it that probably has not had a driver update for Vista (not that I've looked really hard yet). Given how some of it was barely supported in XP (BT878 based capture card for instance), I don't have high hopes.
Well, that and my ISP doesn't route IPv6 traffic, so if I wanted to use it I'd have to tunnel over IPv4, and that's just pointless complexity I don't really need in my network. If my ISP supported IPv6 I'd turn it on even though, as mentioned in the article, trying to use IPv6 on the current internet tends to break stuff and add delays to other things.
If you go back and read the criteria for the Turing test you'll discover that one of the conditions of the test is that the conversation could be restricted to a single area of interest, thus asking "what does coffee taste like" would be outside of the bounds of the test unless you were specifically talking about coffee.
Anyway, a better argument is that the Turing test was passed ages ago, but it's not a very good test for intelligence. The biggest problem is that it requires the human on the other end of the line to make the judgment and humans are not particularly good judges of intelligence.
I'd say #3 is probably already in the works, but it takes time for people to get the production going with stuff like that. The price of oil has skyrocketed so fast that new producers have not had a chance to get started yet. Also, there are some of them that are a bit gun shy from when they tried this in the 80s and lost their shirt when the price of oil collapsed. Although I don't see how yet, it is certainly possible that the price of oil could go back down in a couple of years.
As far as random access on a drive is concerned, a 5MB music file is gigantic. The seek time (1 seek every 3-4 minutes) is a non-issue. If you were playing 20 snippits of different songs every second then it might matter, but for MP3 playing it is not an issue at all. Even if your file gets fragmented for some reason you're only going to be talking about a few dozen seeks at most.
That said, flash does have a bunch of advantages for music players. It's far more shock resistant (for running!), requires less power, and doesn't have to constantly be put to sleep and woken up like spinning magnetic media.
Ironically, last time I got stopped by airport security was because I had a hard drive in my case. Apparently the hard drive looked like a bomb on the x-ray and it freaked the TSA lady out. It's never a good sign when three armed guards come running at you from three different directions. Luckily all they had to do was run my bag through the chemical sniffer, there was no waiting for guards to try to figure it out on their own like in the OP.
Figures they would put their flag on the giant penis.
Bah, Slashdot has been acting weird for me. He's the second half of my post:
This is a good example of where bad ideas come from. A person has a vested interest in proving someone wrong, and they want them to be wrong so very very much, that they half listen to the theories and then immediately (usually before the speaker finishes talking) attempt to poke holes in it. If they find what they think is a hole, they will latch on to that and repeat it every time someone mentions the speaker's topic. It's not only real scientists that have to deal with that. If you ever read the Mythbusters fan boards (for instance) you will see dozens of examples of this (from people who apparently watch about a third of the episode) for every single show, especially from people who really believe the busted myth.
Yes, but the OP missed the point entirely. You don't reduce your carbon emission to 0, rather you offset all of the carbon you emit with some form of carbon capture (normally plant material). In the end, you subtract all of the carbon you sequester from the carbon you emit and try to get the sum to 0 (or less than zero!).
No. This story has been around for awhile and it drives me crazy. We're talking about quantities like 3 parts per trillion on most drugs. It is far far below (many orders of magnitude!) the point at which it would do anything to you, yet so many people seem to nearly panic at the idea of drugs in the water.
I'm just waiting for the study on air to come out.
You know, in Hotlanta spraying someone down with cold water could be considered a public service.
Nice fakepost, troll
You might want to try an even later work then. WinXP is reasonably stable (certainly better than Win98!).
Back when I took graphics in college, it was made abundantly clear that all modern graphics are just large math problems solved in realtime. We did all sorts of work messing with transformation matrices and doing the math (sadly, since this was done by the CS department we did a lot less of the useful stuff and a lot more of the theoretical underpinnings that you don't technically need to know when actually programming something).
Anyway, the point is that Excel is reasonably well set up for doing the kind of math you need to do when making computer graphics and has vector output capabilities. It's a neat trick and something that would likely be useful in teaching the underpinnings (watching what happens as you tweak variables in a transformation matrix in realtime would have been very nice when I was taking my class).
Windows 3.1 was only crash free until you started running applications on it. After that all bets were off. Installing anything but the most standard hardware (cpu, memory, motherboard, keyboard, mouse) could be a problem too, especially with things that required more than a minimal amount of driver support (like sound cards).
Even if this were practical for large businesses like the old pneumatic tube system in NYC, there is no way it would be practical for someone to dig it out to every home in the area for a handful of deliveries per month at the most. Digging tunnels is expensive and time consuming.
The best you could hope for is to have it dug to the basement of a large apartment complex.
I think the parent was more referring to getting some sort of speech to text system running (with a lousy input since the cellphone will be on your belt/purse/pocket and muffled) constantly on a cell phone without draining the battery in a couple of hours. Speech to Text is wildly expensive processor wise for a cell phone, especially if it's not just matching against a handful of known patterns. The other option (keeping a hidden "call" up to send back somewhere for processing) wouldn't work at all with our current cell architecture, the whole system is designed under the assumption that only a few people are ever using their cell phone in a single cell at any one time. Plus, SMS messages wouldn't work if you had a call up 24/7, and your battery would be dead in a few hours.
Or, heck, you can just go to London and be on camera 24/7 outside of your flat.
Yes, I mean Jesus Christ, can you imagine how mad I would be if playing back an simple audio file didn't eat up 15% of my CPU (up from 0.5% in XP)? I know I might lose the ability to play back HD movies that I can't play back anyway because media companies still don't trust me.