undeadhorse This is the first time I've wished I could mod a tag "+1, Funny". (Or should that be "Insightful"? Damn, I can never decide.) Whoever did that, thank you.
Blaming big business for acting big business is like blaming a rattlesnake for biting you. If a rattlesnake were to bite me, I'd be pretty pissed off at it. I understand that "it's in its nature" and all that -- is that supposed to change how I feel about it?
My favorite part of the article was the fact that the third Google ad at the top was:
Quantum Physics Secrets - Transform Your Limiting Beliefs Find True Happiness and Purpose www.MagicalTransformations.com Just sayin'...
Coexistence of divergent species is fairly common. Coexistence in no solid way rules out one species evolving from another. The reasoning used is not clear. Coexistence is common, for how long a period of time? Of course, every time a species changes, there's got to be some interval between the day the first individual with the new trait is born and the day the last one without it dies. I read the quote in TFA as claiming that half a million years is an unusually long time for the process to take. Hence, evidence that that's not how it happened.
[Titan AE]
0D00D, that movie was awesome. Thanx for reminding me.:) No kidding. Best scene ever:
[holding up something resembling a SW Thermal Detonator] "Do you know what this is?" "uh... no...?" "Neither do I! I made it in my sleep! Apparently, I used [exotic-sounding substance name]... very unstable... Look!!! It has a button!!! I wish to press it!!! But... I don't know what will happen if I do...?"
(That's how I remember it from one viewing, back when it first came out; probably mis-quoted, but the only versions I could find online were sigs that sounded even more paraphrased -- corrections welcome.)
Of course, any power plant produces waste heat. Are you claiming that a geothermal plant will inherently/necessarily produce more than any other type of plant of comparable size?
I'm no mechanical engineer, but I don't see any reason why that should be the case.
You might be interested in the Pepper Pad Linux tablet. I got my PP3 a couple months ago, for exactly the same reason: something smaller/lighter to lug around on vacation, and less at stake if it got lost/stolen/damaged. It worked out great for that trip, and I'm likely to end up carrying the laptop around less and less as I move more of my stuff over to it.
IIRC, Apple didn't release a SDK because AT&T is afraid of some buggy app crashing their network. If we interpret "some buggy app crashing their network" as PR-speak for "a 3rd-party VOIP app cutting into their profits", then we're probably getting closer to the truth. Speculation, of course, but my preferred theory on the lockdown is that AT&T demanded it and Apple didn't want to do it, but they caved.
There's a spectrum here, and Moore's Law works at both ends (and points between): it can be formulated as predicting exponential growth in the computing power available for a given constant price (and/or device size, and/or energy consumption, etc.), or it can mean exponential decay in the price (size, energy, etc.) for a given constant level of computing power. One form of the equation is simply the logarithm of the other. And it's largely the same basic technological improvements that drive it at both ends.
So a series of ever-smaller/cheaper devices with roughly constant functionality isn't a threat to Moore's Law, it is Moore's Law! It's just that the industry has tended to ignore that end of the spectrum in favor of the "faster! faster! faster!" end, and that may be changing.
It could, however, be a (much-needed!) threat to Gates's Law, the observation that the efficiency of software seems to halve every 18 months or so, giving us roughly constant functionality for our exponentially-growing computing power. Your example of JavaScript driven productivity software illustrates this perfectly: "But what'll we do with all those cycles/megs when computers are 1000 times more powerful than what we have today?" "I know! We'll create a new software platform that's 1000 times slower than what we're using today, and rewrite all our existing applications in that!! Web!!!"
But there'll also be no shortage of uses for ever-increasing CPU power. You're right that future computing applications will be radically different from what we have today. Re-inventing the desktop in the browser doesn't qualify, and even the Gibson-esque cyberpunk vision of virtual reality is a bit quaint compared to the Singularity (and related) stuff currently going on in science fiction. (Lately, I've been reading a lot of Charles Stross -- I highly recommend Accelerando, which is free to download).
I don't think there is any shortage of porn on the net. There is no point in "collecting it all". You know... it took me years to come to that realization. But you're right.
"Heck, I'm a "right-wing nutcase" and I think the guy is off his rocker." Self-contradictory; a real right-wing nutcase would automatically assume [...] You're what we like to call a "thinking conservative" [...] He could even have meant something like what I am: flamingly liberal on most issues, but aware of some of the mistakes that "The Left" makes, and of a few valid points that the conservatives make. Hence, in the view of many of the Liberals I meet, a right-wing nutcase.
Or, there's the Pepper Pad 3 (I'm writing this on mine.) 800x480, Wifi/BT/USB/IR, Linux, AMD CPU (x86 binaries), very hacker/OSS-friendly system (SDKs, dev community, etc.) Different kind of thing, though -- a tablet PC, not a phone/PDA/pocketPC.
Turing test - tell the computer to simulate Alan Turing, then ask him if he's "just a simulation". Better yet: Program the computer to simulate John Searle, then ask him if he's "just a simulation".
Unfortunately, the religious right will probably try to stop any cure for HIV. Yeah, they already tried it with the new HPV vaccine a few months ago, but from what I saw, it was a half-hearted effort at best -- seemed like the Good Guys have gotten better at their PR, consistently referring to it as an "anti-cancer vaccine" and pre-emptively pointing out how despicable it would be for the zealots to use cervical cancer as a tool to enforce their twisted idea of "morality".
Reginald Finger, an Evangelical member of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, recently announced that he would consider opposing an HIV vaccine--thereby condemning millions of men and women to die unnecessarily from AIDS each year--because such a vaccine would encourage premarital sex by making it less risky. Let him talk! The more noise these guys make, the more people will recognize the Christian Taliban for the Terrorists they are. As long as it's only a hypothetical cure, the point may be too abstract to really hit a lot of people, but if they have the gall to oppose an actual, existing cure, when/if one is discovered, they'll only discredit themselves and their entire hateful ideology.
I don't see why the next ten years would be any different. Operating systems will continue to get more bloated, software packages will get more feature-stuffed, games will continue to demand just slightly more than whatever's available [...] That's not all there is to it. The thing is, remember, there hasn't been a really new "killer app" in closer to fifteen years (i.e., since email and the WWW went mainstream). Games have been pushing constantly, but incrementally, better graphics (plus improving physics and AI). Web browsers have grown more feature-rich and CPU/memory-hungry. Desktops have transparent menus. What else has changed?
AJAX / Web 2.0 stuff is mostly about re-creating the exact same apps that used to be built natively on the desktop, i.e., a new, more CPU/memory-hungry way of doing the same old stuff, but nothing fundamentally new. A blog is a web page that someone else hosts for you and that you can create without needing to know HTML. Social networking actually is looking to be pretty revolutionary, sociologically speaking, but technologically, it's just email and web pages.
It's (probably) true that there's a limit to how many GHz and GBs we can soak up by finding new, less-efficient ways to do the same things over and over again. So yes, a 100x speedup might seem unneeded. But that's failing to take into account the really new technologies that [could|will] come along -- stuff that would be as revolutionary as the CLUI->GUI change.
It's not even that hard to guess what sort of app this might be: offhand, I can suggest fully-immersive virtual reality and speech-controlled UIs, which have been predicted in sci-fi for decades. The only reason they haven't arrived yet is that our computers are still too damn slow to do it properly. (Voice recognition is just about now crossing the threshold of being "accurate enough", but that's just for recognizing the words you're speaking -- for a UI revolution to happen, we also need some major natural-language processing and AI advances.)
In short: Yes, there's plenty that we could do with a 100x faster CPU.
But this is a new low: an obvious joke taken as informational. You've apparently not noticed that sometimes giving an "Informative", "Insightful", or "Interesting" mod to an "obvious joke" can be "obviously" intended to enhance the humor-value of the joke, and/or to be a joke in its own right.
It was built as an overpriced space laboratory. I thought the actual reason it was built was "to give the Shuttle somewhere to go"? And its orbit was chosen for Russia's convenience. I've seen it suggested that "giving Russian rocket scientists something to do post-USSR, other than moving to (say) Iran and getting jobs building ICBMs" may have been a factor too. Which is basically a more cynical / less politician-y way of saying "in the spirit of progress through international friendship and cooperation", etc. Not such a bad idea, though, come to think of it.
For example perhaps [UT2003] should have added rocket launchers that fired remote controlled rockets. After you fire one you switch to the viewpoint of the rocket which you can then steer to home in on whatever target you want
[two replies saying it did have that feature] Heh. "Starglider" had it too. On the Commodore 64.
Republican FCC Chairman Kevin Martin angrily retorted that [...] "If we can't restrict [...] Hollywood will be able to say anything they want, whenever they want," Okay, that's it -- Republicans are no longer allowed to use the word "Freedom" in any political context. Not until they learn what it means. And give us some sort of a sign that they're actually in favor of it.
(And yes, I'm aware of the irony of my presuming to tell them what they can and can't say. If I were someone in such a position of power as to actually enforce it, then it would make me a hypocrite.)
Venezuela's minister of communication and information, William Lara, cited the many laws RCTV had broken, not least the showing of "pornography" (erotically charged soap opera) during children's TV-watching hours Oh, well, if it's because of pornography, that's completely different! Thank God they're not being censored for political reasons!
Seriously, whenever we see a case of "pornography", "indecency", "protection of public morals", etc., being used as an excuse for "real" censorship like this, we need to make a point of how it shows that all censorship is wrong.
I'm sure at least some, and probably most, of our own self-appointed Morality Cops are at least sincere in their intentions. I.e., when they say "Think Of The Children" (TM), they really are thinking of the children, as opposed to intentionally using it as a smokescreen to attack Freedom Of Expression.
That's why we need to show them that this is what they're helping to enable. Even if you believe that the motives of all the anti-pornography (etc.) campaigners are sincere, and even if you agree with their sense of "morals" regarding such material, you have to see that establishing anything -- even pornography -- as a "valid" reason to censor has the effect of giving weapons to every would-be dictator in the world, that they can abuse to suppress their political opposition.
2. Don't use #define! It has file scope, and something like "#define SQUARE(x) x*x" will mess up if you give it "SQUARE(1+1)". Use const instead. Use functions insead of macros. The optimiser will inline simple stuff like that. Re. file scope: if you can figure out where to put function prototypes and const definitions such that they'll be visible in the right places, how is appropriate placement of macro definitions any harder? They go in the same place.
Re. "#define SQUARE(x) x*x": that's why any decent style guide will include a rule like: "In the body of a parameterized macro, never ever ever refer to any of the parameters without using parentheses around it." "#define SQUARE(x) ((x)*(x))" is perfectly safe from that sort of problem. Though you do still have to be careful about passing in expressions that have side-effects (because you don't know how many times they will be evaluated), or that are expensive to compute (inefficient for the same reason).
You don't need a profiler to tell you that an array is going to be better for random access than a linked list. No, but you might need one to tell you whether or not this particular set is going to grow big enough for the difference to matter, or whether efficient insertion vs. efficient lookup matters more, etc. And you're very likely to need one to tell you whether or not a significant percentage of your total execution time is being spent in that piece of code. In my experience, he's right about this: profiler results are often surprising. The point is, they tell you what to optimize, not how to optimize.
Slashdot Mirror
www.MagicalTransformations.com Just sayin'...
[holding up something resembling a SW Thermal Detonator]
"Do you know what this is?"
"uh... no...?"
"Neither do I! I made it in my sleep! Apparently, I used [exotic-sounding substance name]... very unstable... Look!!! It has a button!!! I wish to press it!!! But... I don't know what will happen if I do...?"
(That's how I remember it from one viewing, back when it first came out; probably mis-quoted, but the only versions I could find online were sigs that sounded even more paraphrased -- corrections welcome.)
Of course, any power plant produces waste heat. Are you claiming that a geothermal plant will inherently/necessarily produce more than any other type of plant of comparable size?
I'm no mechanical engineer, but I don't see any reason why that should be the case.
You might be interested in the Pepper Pad Linux tablet. I got my PP3 a couple months ago, for exactly the same reason: something smaller/lighter to lug around on vacation, and less at stake if it got lost/stolen/damaged. It worked out great for that trip, and I'm likely to end up carrying the laptop around less and less as I move more of my stuff over to it.
There's a spectrum here, and Moore's Law works at both ends (and points between): it can be formulated as predicting exponential growth in the computing power available for a given constant price (and/or device size, and/or energy consumption, etc.), or it can mean exponential decay in the price (size, energy, etc.) for a given constant level of computing power. One form of the equation is simply the logarithm of the other. And it's largely the same basic technological improvements that drive it at both ends.
So a series of ever-smaller/cheaper devices with roughly constant functionality isn't a threat to Moore's Law, it is Moore's Law! It's just that the industry has tended to ignore that end of the spectrum in favor of the "faster! faster! faster!" end, and that may be changing.
It could, however, be a (much-needed!) threat to Gates's Law, the observation that the efficiency of software seems to halve every 18 months or so, giving us roughly constant functionality for our exponentially-growing computing power. Your example of JavaScript driven productivity software illustrates this perfectly:
"But what'll we do with all those cycles/megs when computers are 1000 times more powerful than what we have today?"
"I know! We'll create a new software platform that's 1000 times slower than what we're using today, and rewrite all our existing applications in that!! Web!!!"
But there'll also be no shortage of uses for ever-increasing CPU power. You're right that future computing applications will be radically different from what we have today. Re-inventing the desktop in the browser doesn't qualify, and even the Gibson-esque cyberpunk vision of virtual reality is a bit quaint compared to the Singularity (and related) stuff currently going on in science fiction. (Lately, I've been reading a lot of Charles Stross -- I highly recommend Accelerando, which is free to download).
Or, there's the Pepper Pad 3 (I'm writing this on mine.) 800x480, Wifi/BT/USB/IR, Linux, AMD CPU (x86 binaries), very hacker/OSS-friendly system (SDKs, dev community, etc.) Different kind of thing, though -- a tablet PC, not a phone/PDA/pocketPC.
Program the computer to simulate John Searle , then ask him if he's "just a simulation".
AJAX / Web 2.0 stuff is mostly about re-creating the exact same apps that used to be built natively on the desktop, i.e., a new, more CPU/memory-hungry way of doing the same old stuff, but nothing fundamentally new. A blog is a web page that someone else hosts for you and that you can create without needing to know HTML. Social networking actually is looking to be pretty revolutionary, sociologically speaking, but technologically, it's just email and web pages.
It's (probably) true that there's a limit to how many GHz and GBs we can soak up by finding new, less-efficient ways to do the same things over and over again. So yes, a 100x speedup might seem unneeded. But that's failing to take into account the really new technologies that [could|will] come along -- stuff that would be as revolutionary as the CLUI->GUI change.
It's not even that hard to guess what sort of app this might be: offhand, I can suggest fully-immersive virtual reality and speech-controlled UIs, which have been predicted in sci-fi for decades. The only reason they haven't arrived yet is that our computers are still too damn slow to do it properly. (Voice recognition is just about now crossing the threshold of being "accurate enough", but that's just for recognizing the words you're speaking -- for a UI revolution to happen, we also need some major natural-language processing and AI advances.)
In short: Yes, there's plenty that we could do with a 100x faster CPU.
Why yes, I am amused. Thank you.
I wouldn't touch a ten-foot Pole with a guitar.
Yup.
(And yes, I'm aware of the irony of my presuming to tell them what they can and can't say. If I were someone in such a position of power as to actually enforce it, then it would make me a hypocrite.)
Seriously, whenever we see a case of "pornography", "indecency", "protection of public morals", etc., being used as an excuse for "real" censorship like this, we need to make a point of how it shows that all censorship is wrong.
I'm sure at least some, and probably most, of our own self-appointed Morality Cops are at least sincere in their intentions. I.e., when they say "Think Of The Children" (TM), they really are thinking of the children, as opposed to intentionally using it as a smokescreen to attack Freedom Of Expression.
That's why we need to show them that this is what they're helping to enable. Even if you believe that the motives of all the anti-pornography (etc.) campaigners are sincere, and even if you agree with their sense of "morals" regarding such material, you have to see that establishing anything -- even pornography -- as a "valid" reason to censor has the effect of giving weapons to every would-be dictator in the world, that they can abuse to suppress their political opposition.
Re. "#define SQUARE(x) x*x": that's why any decent style guide will include a rule like: "In the body of a parameterized macro, never ever ever refer to any of the parameters without using parentheses around it." "#define SQUARE(x) ((x)*(x))" is perfectly safe from that sort of problem. Though you do still have to be careful about passing in expressions that have side-effects (because you don't know how many times they will be evaluated), or that are expensive to compute (inefficient for the same reason). You don't need a profiler to tell you that an array is going to be better for random access than a linked list. No, but you might need one to tell you whether or not this particular set is going to grow big enough for the difference to matter, or whether efficient insertion vs. efficient lookup matters more, etc. And you're very likely to need one to tell you whether or not a significant percentage of your total execution time is being spent in that piece of code. In my experience, he's right about this: profiler results are often surprising. The point is, they tell you what to optimize, not how to optimize.