I'm frankly amazed at the degree to which people go to redefine words to try to change the tenor and direction of debate. A good example is the anti-leech trying to redefine your desire to not read their advertising as theft. To use the word theft to describe such actions is to belittle the meaning of the word theft, making it useless to describe actual property crimes.
Anti-leech would have you believe that you are under some obligation to make their particular business model (which is apparently to gain money
by annoying people with popups) or else you are stealing from them. They admit that in a legal sense, it is of course incorrect to call it theft, but in a moral sense such a label is justified.
They are, well, full of it.
It isn't the responsibility of consumers to make a particular broken business model profitable: that is the responsibility of business owners. If you can't figure out a way to make money on the Internet, then you can't, but it seems pretty silly to bitch at your target audience for that problem. When your viewers decide to employ pop-up blocking or ad-filtering software, they
are sending you as their content provider a message: this stuff is not of value to me, I don't want to waste even a single brain cell dealing with it. It is true that eventually your advertisers will likely notice that the response rate from web based advertisements are ridiculously low and will stop spending money on click-throughs and the like, and that will (at least according to anti-leech) spell an end to many websites.
Which would of course be a hideous tragedy, because who doesn't want to read through more advertising.
Businesses should learn a new lesson: intrusive
pop up advertising doesn't work. Spam doesn't work. Stop paying for it. Be creative, and try
to make information about your product visible
to those who actually want it, don't
cast it scattergun style in front of millions of
people for whom it just represents an annoyance.
Browsers such as Mozilla now have pop-up blocking
because users want it, and that means
that the users don't want to read your add for X-10 cameras or you've won a free prize while
trying to access their bank accounts. Listen
to your customers, and develop a business based
upon respecting them, not on blanketing them with
crap everytime they log in.
Having a CD burner inside your DVD player adds no value whatsoever other than saving a bit of space. Now if it had VIDEO IN and could burn a (S)VCD directly without PC intervention, that would be different. But as it is it's just a box that happens to have two different devices inside that cannot take advantage of each other in any particular way. No particular synergies at all.
I don't know about you, but I am getting tired of having these huge beige monstrosities perched atop (or more frequently alongside) my desk. I want to build boxes that are more like commercial electronics, and this means reducing the footprint. Doesn't it seem odd to have to put two individual drives into a system, both of which largely read the same format?
But really, how many fatal accidents has the Soyouz TM had? (0) how many the US shuttle? (1)
Soyuz 1 crashed on reentry due to a failed parachute deployment, killing Vladamir Komorov. Soyuz 11 depressurized during re-entry, killing Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patseyev.
There are two sides to this question: a pragmatic question and a legal one.
Pragmatically, if you provide them the source, there is no practical limit to their ability to modify, redistribute or sell the code.
Therefore, it falls back upon the legal system: you need a contract that you can both agree that protects the intellectual property rights that you think are important to preserve.
Of course, none of this has even the tiniest bit to do with open source. The restrictions on modifications and redistribution that you seek are explicitly disallowed by any definition of open source licensing you are likely to run accross.
Frankly, I'm unsure why any business would pay you to develop software that they integrate into their business but for which they retain few rights in the future, but you might be able to hoodwink them into such a circumstance. It probably would be easier to get them to agree to a true open source license, where both parties retain the same rights to modification and redistribution
It is wonderful to see open source in an integral role in a popular movie such as this. This is just the beginning of the mainstreaming of open source, hopefully.
Moviemaking at the scale of The Two Towers is unlikely to ever be mainstream.
Indeed, the original article seems to have been written by someone who literally fell out of the sky and decided that he needed to write a review of webservers.
I'm not sure about how few people know about boa and thttpd, but neither of them are new and both of them make excellent webservers. I ran two virtual hosted (admittedly low traffic) websites using thttpd for years on a P5 133 with only 32M of memory. It's dead simple to set up, efficient and fast. I also evaluated boa, and found it to be excellent as well, I picked thttpd because I liked its virtual hosting a tiny bit better and thought I might make use of throttling at some point.
I keep telling people that if they are one of the few who care about performance enough to run a specialized NBIO web server like thttpd or Boa or mathopd, they shouldn't throw away half their performance by running Linux. Use FreeBSD.
I do run FreeBSD too. While I'm not sure about the relative speed of both, I wouldn't dismiss Jef's comment out of hand either, he's done benchmarking on a wide variety of systems as part of his thttpd work.
I never had any reason to doubt this event growing up. Then I heard about the conspiracy angle, checked out all the material (movies, books, forums), and I am now in the 'undecided' category. For me, the most convincing "evidence" supportng the conspiracy theory is the radiation belt, and NASA's inability (even at present IIRC) to send any living thing through it without receiving a lethal dose. Most of the other facts are hit or miss, and pretty subjective.
It's a pity that some people get stupider as they get older. You are obviously too foolish to realize that citing NASA's "inability to send any living thing through it [ed: the radiation belt]" is begging the question. NASA did send living beings through the radiation belts: they were called Apollo astronauts. Perhaps you've heard of them. You can't use the fact that you don't believe they did so as evidence that they didn't do so.
Slashdot recently reported that Dreamworks [was] Delv[ing] Into Anime [slashdot.org] Maybe a letter campaign could convince Disney to do the right thing and relinquish their control of Miyazaki's films to a company who might know what to do with them.
It's time for a reality check. The United States isn't Japan. Anime is becoming fashionable to admire, especially given the work of Miyazaki. But all the promotion in the world won't make people go to a movie that they don't want to, and no amount of promotion is going to change that.
Disney is in the business of making money. They make money by promoting films, releasing them, and collecting ticket sales. Spirited Away is not going to make money in theatrical release, no matter how much promotion is done. As pathetic as it sounds, the Country Bears and Treasure Planet almost certainly will. That is not really a function of Disney's promotional capability, but a reflection of the audience.
Perhaps you think that Spirited Away should open on 3000 screens and be promoted on television. But I suspect there are a large number of Disney stockholders who think otherwise. And having seen Sprited Away twice before with subtitles, and this weekend (on a digital screen no less!) with the new dub that John Lasseter consulted on, I think it is great that it is getting theater time. Kudos to Disney, I doubt they'll make a dime on this project, but it is great to see Miyazaki's work in theaters.
Why does the machine even ask you these questions?
on
Secrets Of BIOS Tweaking
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Honestly, isn't your brain full of important things to think about? Wouldn't you like a machine which didn't needle you about details of its own operation that you don't understand? When you hop in your car, you don't expect to have to set fuel intermix ratios and timing to get out of your driveway, yet your computer manufacturer seems to think that you probably know better than they do what all these settings should be.
Consider the memory options listed in the article. Do you know what the 15M-16M memory hole is? Autodetect DIMM/PCI Clock? Bank Interleave? The article says Bank Interleave gives you a massive performance benefit, why then have an option to turn it off? What's the point? Data Integrity Mode? Don't you think it would be nice if your computer knew whether it had ECC ram in it or not? Delay DRAM Read Latch? The article says that if you don't set it right, you can get crashes in your machine. Golly, don't you think manufacturers should just make the computer get it right?
Memory options go on and on and on. The only thing I want to know is that my computer can read whatever memory is installed at the highest reliable speed. I shouldn't have to tweak the no less than two dozen different settings to get my machine working reliably, and those are just the memory related ones. A similar number awaits in the PCI and AGP configuration settings.
Legitimate uses of the BIOS are perhaps to enable or disable peripherals and to choose boot devices. It might also be nice to have a mode which shows what peripherals are installed. Other than that, I'm perfectly willing to allow the computer to pick out its working parameters. If the resulting computer proves to be unreliable, then the manufacturer should be out of business for making crappy computers.
The biggest problem with literate programming is that most people don't write programs that are worthy of exposition. Most programs are written under extreme time constraints to solve immediate or practical problems, and their complexity arises from handling exceptions, special cases, and last minute or ill conceived extensions. Documenting these with prose actually doesn't help very much, as the prose reads pretty much as the code does: as a set of ill conceived exceptions rather than bold themes. Making the prose flow well is just work that could be used to make the code better.
If your code doesn't have these faults, then the code is already an expression of the program ideas, and one that you can excecute, so in that case literate programming techniques are needed to a much smaller degree.
There is no doubt that literate programming (like extreme programming) has its benefits, but their principal benefits are to encourage an attitude of critical evaluation to your coding efforts. This criticism is encouraged in literate programming but not a unique feature of that approach.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs -- Hands down the single finest book ever written about computer science
The Unix Programming Environment
The practice of programming -- Anything Pike writes is worth reading
Programming Pearls
Mythical Man Month
Extreme Programming
I've included no books on C++ or object oriented design because I hold the rather radical opinion that they aren't very interesting. Pike's book does more to explain how to program than any book on patterns ever have.
No, it isn't a dumb idea. It is a very very good idea, and one that carries few risks that aren't risks inherent whenever any citizen works outside the limits their government prescribes for them.
It isn't hard for to come up with conventional cryptography that is robust against normal attacks. The technology is well understood and can be engineered to be robust against virtually any conventional cryptographic attack. Similarly, steganography is fairly well understood. Even if the government could detect that images or audio files were being used as a covert channel, they would be unable to break the underlying encryption. It would be vastly easier for them to just imprison and torture people into revealing their activities than to assume a technological attack.
Individuals in these countries are exercising a form of civil disobedience, and it is important that they continue to do so. If oppressive governments are forced to spend all their efforts to detect and eliminate perceived threats, it divides their power and makes it more difficult to hide their clandestine misdeeds.
If it really was on a collision course to Earth, there is nothing we could have done about it anyway, other than stampede madly from its predicted impact site.
I'm not sure that I understand the question that is posed in this article. If your QA teams are still finding lots of bugs, why do you think that testing less will be good for either your development team or for your customers?
The simple fact of the matter is that no amount of testing does anything to reduce the defect rate of software. If your software has lots of defects when it reaches QA, then it is due to a failing in design and implementation. To fix such problems usually requires going back to basics: developing robust specifications, robust designs and robust implementations. Testing in the ideal merely verifies functionality. In the best of all real worlds, it uncovers bugs in implementation. In the typical/worst case scenario, it uncovers bugs in design.
Somebody threatened a lawsuit. In this case, Sony was threatening Blizzard with a DMCA suit. In cases like this, it is a case of "cover your ass". You want to be able to demonstrate that if one of your employees is engaged in illegal activities, that it is in direct violation to stated company policy. You might still get sued, but it is somewhat less damning than if it was widely known in the company and ignored.
Someone is sucking too much bandwidth, and it is costing the company money. I know from experience that given the opportunity, people will acquire as much bandwidth as they can, often at the expense of other legitimate business users.
In both cases, the company is merely acting in a way which is consistent with its profitable operation by minimizing potential costs and risks. In the real world where people work, get paid, spend and pay taxes, that seems prudent.
Designing a modern microprocessor can not be done by amateurs or a group of people with a B.S. degrees in electrical engineering. Sure, many of us have taken undergraduate architecture classes and maybe have designed a simple pipelined microprocessor in Mentor Graphics or VHDL/Verilog. Some of us maybe even implemented it with FPGAs.
This is either irrelevant or just stupid, depending on how you look at it,
It is true that no amateurs are going to build their own 747 either, but there are no lack of people who build their own planes and gliders. Using FPGAsof modest cost, amateurs can implement processors which are perhaps 8 years back in the power curve. I don't know about you, but I found the computer that I owned 8 years ago to be quite a useful gadget. The ability to reprogram the core of your microprocessor to (say) add new instructions, peripherals and capabilities seems to be a cool one. As the FPGA industry moves forward, experimenters in this technology will also track Moore's law improvements. Yes, they will always be behind what billion dollar fabs can produce, but I fail to see why this is a problem for amateur chip designers.
Microprocessors are becoming so complex to design and build, that only a few companies are surviving. Sort of like the aircraft industry. There are only 2 remaining companies in this world that design and build 300+ passenger commercial aircraft (Boeing and Airbus). It is infeasible for a new competitor to arise because of the capital involved (unless of course it is nationally sponsored).
Again, so what? We were talking about amateur designs, not going into competition with Intel and AMD. I imagine that Linus heard similar arguments about the infeasibility of writing his own operating system.
Linus took the wide availability of inexpensive PC computers and leveraged those to create a new operating system. Amateur FPGA designers could try to leverage the availability of inexpensive FPGA chips to design their own processors. If you asked me the likelihood that anyone would be using them in a commercial environment a year from now, I'd say it was pretty low, but in a ten year time span....
Uh, I agree with you, and if you had read carefully, you would have seen that. Glass is an amorphous solid, and exhibits no flow at any kind of temperatures and pressures which one might encounter in one's day to day lifes. If glass flowed as easily as the anectdotal "look at these old windows, they look like they are flowing down" evidence would suggest, astronomical telescopes could not be made to perform for more than a few days, as changes in the shape of lenses and mirrors would reduce their effectiveness.
The Michelson-Morely experiment was important because it basically put the nail in the coffin of the idea of the aether, but measurements of the speed of light had actually been done for literally centuries before. Many of these experiments can easily be duplicated with minimal equipment today. Check out http://www.central-jersey-sas.org/projects/speed_o f_light/index.html for some details. I also believe that there was a duplicate of MM in the Amateur Scientist column of Scientific American, which you can now get on CD (well worth getting for more ideas).
From memory, some of the more interesting experiments the Amateur Scientist column include:
Construction of a wide variety of optical instruments such as microscopes, telescopes, spectrascopes, and Schlieren systems.
Dangerous projects like plasma jets, X-ray machines, solid fuel rockets and particle accelerators.
Several different kinds of lasers.
Foucault pendulums
Observations of earth satellites
Making diffraction gratings with a ruling engine.
Aerodynamics experiments with small planes using water
Tons of goodies, all worth goofing around with. If you can't come up with some good ideas after leafing through this material, you just aren't trying.
Another story about pitch, not nearly as (okay, not at all) documented as the pitch drop experiment, but you might find it amusing.
Pitch is still used in the polishing of high quality optical components like lenses and telescope mirrors. The rumor is that at some optical fab shop they had a rather large barrel of pitch which they would chisel out chunks to melt and pour into polishing laps. After a couple of decades of work, they reached the bottom of the barrel, and found several hammers and chisels resting at the bottom, apparently having been left on top and slowly sunk through the entire volume of pitch.
It is a nice story, but it may be as false as the idea that glass is a liquid and flows under the force of gravity.
Re:Perl isn't unreadable - some Perl programs are
on
Exegesis 4 Out
·
· Score: 1
For instance, in Java "String foo;" and in perl "$foo". Now, later in the code, if I see "$foo" in my perl code, I know immediatly that I'm dealing with a scalar, or %foo is a hash, whereas in most other languages I have to either remember the variable declarations or go back and find the variable declaration in the file.
Let me guess, you are one of those perverse people who thinks that Hungarian notation is a really good idea. Honestly, if you have to work THAT hard to remember what type a particular variable name refers to, you are well on your way to writing impenetrable code anyway.
Of course real programming languages are strongly typed anyway, so you really don't need to carry the type along encoded in the variable name. Your interpreter/compiler should tell you that you have a poorly typed program.
My, that is amazing! Transparent aluminum oxide! What an incredible development! You know what would be really cool? If you could make it in say, red, or green, or blue....
Advice to slashdot readers: stay in school until it begins to work.
If I haven't missed the boat here, it's really a very interesting achievment.
You haven't missed the boat, it is still chained to the dock with a cable labeled The Pigeonhole Principle. If the data is random, then all potential paths through all potential n-dimensional spaces are equally likely, and there are a lot of them. Too many to be described by any fewer bits at all.
The creation of imaginary celebrities is nothing new. Since the dawn of time people have made up stories about characters which have captured the attention and imagination of people, becoming more real sometimes than actual people. Ask a young kid today who he thinks is more real, Harry Potter or Tony Blair?
Computer graphics can certainly allow the creation of new kinds of media, but represents an evolution, rather than a revolution in story telling. The creation of interesting, vibrant, living characters has been done for centuries, and is probably not made significantly easier by the development of computer graphics.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm frankly amazed at the degree to which people go to redefine words to try to change the tenor and direction of debate. A good example is the anti-leech trying to redefine your desire to not read their advertising as theft. To use the word theft to describe such actions is to belittle the meaning of the word theft, making it useless to describe actual property crimes.
Anti-leech would have you believe that you are under some obligation to make their particular business model (which is apparently to gain money by annoying people with popups) or else you are stealing from them. They admit that in a legal sense, it is of course incorrect to call it theft, but in a moral sense such a label is justified.
They are, well, full of it.
It isn't the responsibility of consumers to make a particular broken business model profitable: that is the responsibility of business owners. If you can't figure out a way to make money on the Internet, then you can't, but it seems pretty silly to bitch at your target audience for that problem. When your viewers decide to employ pop-up blocking or ad-filtering software, they are sending you as their content provider a message: this stuff is not of value to me, I don't want to waste even a single brain cell dealing with it. It is true that eventually your advertisers will likely notice that the response rate from web based advertisements are ridiculously low and will stop spending money on click-throughs and the like, and that will (at least according to anti-leech) spell an end to many websites.
Which would of course be a hideous tragedy, because who doesn't want to read through more advertising.
Businesses should learn a new lesson: intrusive pop up advertising doesn't work. Spam doesn't work. Stop paying for it. Be creative, and try to make information about your product visible to those who actually want it, don't cast it scattergun style in front of millions of people for whom it just represents an annoyance. Browsers such as Mozilla now have pop-up blocking because users want it, and that means that the users don't want to read your add for X-10 cameras or you've won a free prize while trying to access their bank accounts. Listen to your customers, and develop a business based upon respecting them, not on blanketing them with crap everytime they log in.
I don't know about you, but I am getting tired of having these huge beige monstrosities perched atop (or more frequently alongside) my desk. I want to build boxes that are more like commercial electronics, and this means reducing the footprint. Doesn't it seem odd to have to put two individual drives into a system, both of which largely read the same format?
Soyuz 1 crashed on reentry due to a failed parachute deployment, killing Vladamir Komorov. Soyuz 11 depressurized during re-entry, killing Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patseyev.
Pragmatically, if you provide them the source, there is no practical limit to their ability to modify, redistribute or sell the code.
Therefore, it falls back upon the legal system: you need a contract that you can both agree that protects the intellectual property rights
that you think are important to preserve.
Of course, none of this has even the tiniest bit
to do with open source. The restrictions on
modifications and redistribution that you seek
are explicitly disallowed by any definition of
open source licensing you are likely to run accross.
Frankly, I'm unsure why any business would pay
you to develop software that they integrate into
their business but for which they retain few
rights in the future, but you might be able to
hoodwink them into such a circumstance.
It probably would be easier to get them to agree to
a true open source license, where both parties
retain the same rights to modification and redistribution
Moviemaking at the scale of The Two Towers is unlikely to ever be mainstream.
Indeed, the original article seems to have been written by someone who literally fell out of the sky and decided that he needed to write a review of webservers.
I'm not sure about how few people know about boa and thttpd, but neither of them are new and both of them make excellent webservers. I ran two virtual hosted (admittedly low traffic) websites using thttpd for years on a P5 133 with only 32M of memory. It's dead simple to set up,
efficient and fast. I also evaluated boa, and found it to be excellent as
well, I picked thttpd because I liked its virtual hosting a tiny bit better and thought I might make use of throttling at some point.
I do run FreeBSD too. While I'm not sure about
the relative speed of both, I wouldn't dismiss
Jef's comment out of hand either, he's done
benchmarking on a wide variety of systems as part
of his thttpd work.
It's a pity that some people get stupider as they get older. You are obviously too foolish to realize that citing NASA's "inability to send any living thing through it [ed: the radiation belt]" is begging the question. NASA did send living beings through the radiation belts: they were called Apollo astronauts. Perhaps you've heard of them. You can't use the fact that you don't believe they did so as evidence that they didn't do so.
It's time for a reality check. The United States isn't Japan. Anime is becoming fashionable to admire, especially given the work of Miyazaki. But all the promotion in the world won't make people go to a movie that they don't want to, and no amount of promotion is going to change that.
Disney is in the business of making money. They make money by promoting films, releasing them, and collecting ticket sales. Spirited Away is not going to make money in theatrical release, no matter how much promotion is done. As pathetic as it sounds, the Country Bears and Treasure Planet almost certainly will. That is not really a function of Disney's promotional capability, but a reflection of the audience.
Perhaps you think that Spirited Away should open on 3000 screens and be promoted on television. But I suspect there are a large number of Disney stockholders who think otherwise. And having seen Sprited Away twice before with subtitles, and this weekend (on a digital screen no less!) with the new dub that John Lasseter consulted on,
I think it is great that it is getting theater time. Kudos to Disney, I doubt they'll make a dime on this project, but it is great to see
Miyazaki's work in theaters.
Consider the memory options listed in the article. Do you know what the 15M-16M memory hole is? Autodetect DIMM/PCI Clock? Bank Interleave? The article says Bank Interleave gives you a massive performance benefit, why then have an option to turn it off? What's the point?
Data Integrity Mode? Don't you think it would be nice if your computer knew whether it had ECC ram in it or not? Delay DRAM Read Latch? The article says that if you don't set it right, you can get crashes in your machine. Golly, don't you think manufacturers should just make the computer get it right?
Memory options go on and on and on. The only thing I want to know is that my computer can read whatever memory is installed at the highest reliable speed. I shouldn't have to tweak the no less than two dozen different settings to
get my machine working reliably, and those are just the memory related ones. A similar number awaits in the PCI and AGP configuration settings.
Legitimate uses of the BIOS are perhaps to enable or disable peripherals and to choose boot devices. It might also be nice to have a mode which shows what peripherals are installed. Other than that, I'm perfectly willing to allow the computer to pick out its working parameters. If the resulting computer proves to be unreliable, then the manufacturer should be out of business for making crappy computers.
Rant concluded.
The biggest problem with literate programming is that most people don't write programs that are worthy of exposition. Most programs are written under extreme time constraints to solve immediate or practical problems, and their complexity arises from handling exceptions, special cases, and last minute or ill conceived extensions. Documenting these with prose actually doesn't help very much, as the prose reads pretty much as the code does: as a set of ill conceived exceptions rather than bold themes. Making the prose flow well is just work that could be used to make the code better.
If your code doesn't have these faults, then the code is already an expression of the program ideas, and one that you can excecute, so in that case literate programming techniques are needed to a much smaller degree.
There is no doubt that literate programming (like extreme programming) has its benefits, but their principal benefits are to encourage an attitude of critical evaluation to your coding efforts. This criticism is encouraged in literate programming
but not a unique feature of that approach.
Anything Pike writes is worth reading
I've included no books on C++ or object oriented
design because I hold the rather radical opinion
that they aren't very interesting. Pike's book
does more to explain how to program than any
book on patterns ever have.
No, it isn't a dumb idea. It is a very very good idea, and one that carries few risks that aren't risks inherent whenever any citizen works outside the limits their government prescribes for them.
It isn't hard for to come up with conventional cryptography that is robust against normal attacks. The technology is well understood and can be engineered to be robust against virtually any conventional cryptographic attack. Similarly, steganography is fairly well understood. Even if the government could detect that images or audio files were being used as a covert channel, they would be unable to break the underlying encryption. It would be vastly easier for them to just imprison and torture people into revealing their activities than to assume a technological attack.
Individuals in these countries are exercising a form of civil disobedience, and it is important that they continue to do so. If oppressive governments are forced to spend all their efforts to detect and eliminate perceived threats, it divides their power and makes it more difficult to hide their clandestine misdeeds.
If it really was on a collision course to Earth,
there is nothing we could have done about it anyway, other than stampede madly from its
predicted impact site.
The simple fact of the matter is that no amount of testing does anything to reduce the defect rate of software. If your software has lots of defects when it reaches QA, then it is due to a failing in design and implementation. To fix
such problems usually requires going back to basics: developing robust specifications, robust
designs and robust implementations. Testing
in the ideal merely verifies functionality. In
the best of all real worlds, it uncovers bugs in implementation. In the typical/worst case
scenario, it uncovers bugs in design.
In both cases, the company is merely acting in a way which is consistent with its profitable operation by minimizing potential costs and risks. In the real world where people work, get paid, spend and pay taxes, that seems prudent.
This is either irrelevant or just stupid, depending on how you look at it,
It is true that no amateurs are going to build their own 747 either, but there are no lack of people who build their own planes and gliders. Using FPGAsof modest cost, amateurs can implement processors which are perhaps 8 years back in the power curve. I don't know about you, but I found the computer that I owned 8 years ago to be quite a useful gadget. The ability to reprogram the core of your microprocessor to (say) add new instructions, peripherals and capabilities seems to be a cool one. As the FPGA industry moves forward, experimenters in this technology will also track Moore's law improvements. Yes, they will always be behind what billion dollar fabs can produce, but I fail to see why this is a problem for amateur chip designers.
Again, so what? We were talking about amateur designs, not going into competition with Intel and AMD. I imagine that Linus heard similar arguments about the infeasibility of writing his own operating system.
Linus took the wide availability of inexpensive PC computers and leveraged those to create a new operating system. Amateur FPGA designers could try to leverage the availability of inexpensive FPGA chips to design their own processors. If you asked me the likelihood that anyone would be using them in a commercial environment a year from now, I'd say it was pretty low, but in a ten year time span....
Uh, I agree with you, and if you had read carefully, you would have seen that. Glass is an amorphous solid, and exhibits no flow at any kind of temperatures and pressures which one might encounter in one's day to day lifes. If glass flowed as easily as the anectdotal "look at these old windows, they look like they are flowing down" evidence would suggest, astronomical telescopes could not be made to perform for more than a few days, as changes in the shape of lenses and mirrors would reduce their effectiveness.
From memory, some of the more interesting experiments the Amateur Scientist column include:
Tons of goodies, all worth goofing around with. If you can't come up with some good ideas after leafing through this material, you just aren't trying.
Pitch is still used in the polishing of high quality optical components like lenses and telescope mirrors. The rumor is that at some optical fab shop they had a rather large barrel of pitch which they would chisel out chunks to melt and pour into polishing laps. After a couple of decades of work, they reached the bottom of the barrel, and found several hammers and chisels resting at the bottom, apparently having been left on top and slowly sunk through the entire volume of pitch.
It is a nice story, but it may be as false as the idea that glass is a liquid and flows under the force of gravity.
Let me guess, you are one of those perverse people who thinks that Hungarian notation is a really good idea. Honestly, if you have to work THAT hard to remember what type a particular variable name refers to, you are well on your way to writing impenetrable code anyway.
Of course real programming languages are strongly typed anyway, so you really don't need to carry the type along encoded in the variable name. Your interpreter/compiler should tell you that you have a poorly typed program.
Advice to slashdot readers: stay in school until it begins to work.
What we need is that transparent aluminum! Why's it taking so long?
It's taking so long because it just isn't possible. Conductors can't be transparent, despite what the best scientific minds at slashdot might say.
Longitude, not latitude.
If I haven't missed the boat here, it's really a very interesting achievment.
You haven't missed the boat, it is still chained to the dock with a cable labeled
The Pigeonhole Principle. If the data is random, then all potential paths through all potential n-dimensional spaces are equally likely, and there are a lot of them. Too many to be described by any fewer bits at all.
It's snake oil folks. Move along.
Computer graphics can certainly allow the creation of new kinds of media, but represents an evolution, rather than a revolution in story telling. The creation of interesting, vibrant, living characters has been done for centuries, and is probably not made significantly easier by the development of computer graphics.