Obviously, we might need more than 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 kbytes storage on a non-specialized computer some time in the future. Nobody, incuding original poster, deny that. But it would take a very long time. One thing is we don't need nearly that amount today, the other and perhaps more important thing is it is impossible now. Such storage with a reasonable physical device size would require either a very significant breakthru or several incremental, nevertheless revolutionary, refinements in storage technology.
Harddisk storage space have grown roughly by a factor of ten million in the last 20 years. With the same rate, it would take another 25 years before we need that amount. I'm pretty sure kernel 4.0 will be out long before that.
SSE isn't even comparable, there are lots of thing you can't do with SSE but can do with Altivec. SSE 2 fixes the most important one of these issues, full precision floating point, yet offers little else over SSE. Altivec is about two times faster clock/clock but the huge clock speed difference more than makes up for it if both programs are vectorized. Since Altivec has some features that can only be implemented with relativily slow fpu on x86s, this is not always possible. Also all new Apple software is targetted to two specific CPUs, both with Altivec units. So their programmers are more eager to use all latest features. OTOH SSE2 has a very low adaption rate in x86 world as most cpus do not implement it.
I don't mean to say P4 is not competetive with G4, actually it is way faster. Even faster are Athlons, just not in SSE2/Altivec optimizable stuff (since they can't do SSE2.) If P4 or Opteron based Apples come along they would also be very fast (like they did with G4s, software will be specifically optimized for apple hardware.) I just wrote this to clear up some confusion over benchmarks.
It's one of those long-forgotten points: after all the dust settles, ease of use destroys flexibility. Period.
It doesn't. Period.
A config file is a config file, you can change it with vim or you can write a EliteConf gui configurator that leaves all options avaliable to you and that would be pretty flexible. There may also be a tool called EasyConf that does the job with significantly reduced flexibility and enhanced ease of use. EasyConf, EliteConf and vim can all be installed side by side. Although not a very good idea from an UI design POW, it is even possible that they are integrated (eg. Simple Setup/Expert Setup/Show Me Config File tabs) Had EasyConf for all programs existed, we wouldn't have had any issue with ease of use. Since unix config files are usually plain text files, there has never been a problem with flexibility either.
All the GUI has done has changed the knowledge from which option to use to which radio box to click.
Actually it is all about keeping underlying structure away from the user unless user wants to tweak it explicitly. Hiding less used options, finding good defaults and grouping options to a goal oriented setup is the key to EasyConf. Exposing all options with a GUI is EliteConf and does not improve ease of use in any way (except perhaps by displaying better baloon helps than comments in the text file.)
The modified virus need not express its deadly gene as frequently as ebola. Infact, for terrorist use it doesn't have to express it ever. Killing people is not the goal of terrorism, it is a tool to scare people. With potentially expressible ebole proteins circulating in my veins, I would be scared more than enough.
Then again, I don't live in or near the States. Local terrorist still prefer bombs and AK47s.
Easy mars mission requires either a breakthru in rocket technology (in that case US might go as well) or massive space infrastructure spending (IOW we have the technology to make Mars our backyard, but cost of building the infrastructure is far higher than just going to Mars a few times without it.) As it stands, going to Mars is hard, doable but hard. Nuclear rockets do not solve the problem and ion propulsion isn't even relevant.
Russia no logner has space facilities or manpower for such an undertaking. Most Russian engineers working on space projects have jobs elsewhere now, already retired or immigrated to western countries. Also Russian space program had a very good vision in the 60ties but since then it has been in a constant decline. MIR and almost all other other Russian success stories are rooted in that era of Soviet space program. Assuming they can find the money, they will have to restart planning about space, reaccumulate the manpower and build new space facilities before they can do anything significant.
I sincerly hope they prove me wrong; I want to see people on Mars before I die and I have no hope for a NASA or an ESA mission. NASA and American public in general lost the magic in manned space missions. ESA has almost no experience in manned missions and the way they plan things, this won't change soon. China has the money and determination. It is a matter of time before they have the technology. I guess our best bet is primarily a Chineese mission in 2030ties.
Also you already have a very good chance of recovery if you are a mouse with cancer. If one tenth of miracle cancer cures for mice worked for humans, cancer would have been a long lost illness.
You have good points but you are mistaken about assumed defaults. I do mess with defaults (following your example f: is my only windows drive) and windows installers still doesn't break. That is not to say all programs install nicely (eg. Soar) but those broken "installers" are always executable archives rather than installers proper.
I never used debian. I keep hearing apt-get is very good but I'm likely to stick with a source based distro after being spoiled with gentoo:)
And Windows installers still suck, because each installer is ad hoc.
Huh? I find installers for windows programs excellent as they do what they are supposed to do every single time. I don't recall a single instance of a windows installer failing. OTOH the best linux installer I used so far is emerge, and I had 4 serious problems with it in just 3 weeks. Second best linux installer (urpmi) was really horrible. Either you use a very good linux installer, or you use very strong stuff to get high o have such a twisted view of linux vs. windows installers. Which one is it?
Our solar system is a member of the first generation stars that can support life. That doesn't mean our sun and all such first generation stars came into being at the same time. Rather they have emerged, and continue to emerge, after a certain number of generations of stars have lived and died (which is only first and second generation of stars, IIRC) in their neighbourhood. And of those life supportable generation stars, our sun is one of the first (...few billion). It is reasonable to assume we are among the first intelligent lifeforms and even though we probably are not the first, no civilization is much older (deltaAge>3billion years) than us.
Ofcourse this assumes complex chemistry is required for life. I think this is a fairly good assumption.
You should better evaluate whether your hypothesis about coin being fair is true much earlier than 10000000 tosses. Suppose that your "quarter" actually has two heads side, and you would notice such an oddity with 0.9999999999 probability. Also there is 0.000000000001 probability that coin is rigged in some other way. What can be said about outcome of next toss? p(Heads)=1. With an unlimited precision maths library you can have a lot of 9s, after "0." instead of a boring "1", if you are so inclined.
Never heard of selection bias, did you? Those probabilities about life and intelligent life are not infinitesmall, infact at least one of them seems to be just 1 (probability of primitive life.) For a non-zero probability of evolution of those primitive beings into intelligent life, selection bias kicks in, and we are destined to be "here", for we can't wonder about probability of intelligent lifes if we are not already an intelligent life form.
Re:My one big issue with the film (SPOILER?)
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 1
I guess movie -which I haven't watched yet- is substantially different from the short story -which I've read. The answer is simple, by commiting a crime, they are criminals. And they already had committed the murder. The fact that time of the murder they have committed lies in the future at time of arrest is irrelevant. By preempting the murder with arrest, they do not avoid the crime itself, they just push the crime to an alternative timeline. Precogs do not predict the murder, they witness it.
If you try that with an emulator, you'll come unstuck when you come across self-modifying code, or things that access memory mapped registers (e.g. on a 68000 the instruction mov d0,4(a0) offers no clue as to whether the write is to hardware or memory.
Perhaps you should check uae-jit patch (which has been ported to basillisk and integrated into win series of uae) before concluding jit based 68s emulation is not practical.
Strange how many cranks the NASA Breakthrough Physics Program gives respectability to. NASA's least-funded irrelevant sideshow picks up every nut that comes along, investigates their claim, and nothing comes of it.
The common property of all those nuts coming along is:
a) They are usually credible guys and real scientists. Their specific theories may not have the same credibility, but most often than not they would agree with other scientists and vice versa.
b) Their ideas are not entirely incompatible with modern physics. Usually they are investigating non-orthodox interpretations of the current theories. In non-limiting cases, their theories and current theories lead to same observations.
c) They make experimentally testable claims. Most experiments are also low budget.
d) If their claims are found to be true, resulting utility is enormous.
This is what I would call a good gamble. But it is not my money, so it is not my call.
I keep seeing comments like this and understand that you people have really serious things to do with your computers, but aren't you overestimating stability needs of people like me, the home user? I never ever had a serious problem with 2.4.x series, and I used almost all of them. Despite huge changelog, I don't think 2.4.19 is any worse. Infact, considering how much revisions 2.4.19 has gone thru before going gold, I expect it to be more stable than -say- 2.4.14. The flux you are talking about has been backported from 2.5 series, and added to an already stable kernel. No need to scare away people.
I can be reasonably happy with a starcraft clone with a clean unit AI/unit command (programmatical) interface (as opposed to original's evil script language -which actually works on strategy level.) I dislike tactical combat depended on reflexes (specifically I hate microing magic users) but with the original SC there is no other way. If you are slow with manipulating units, you have to have a big strategic advantage to stand a chance.
I would like to have more intelligent units, so that I can concentrate on the war, rather than battles. Even with still dumb units, tactical burden may be lessened a lot. With current SC one can't give units times orders ("wait 2 seconds, then attack"), suspended orders ("nuke when orange trigger happens) conditional orders ("if you see 6-12 mutas, flee to base. Otherwise fight.") build armies (group commands follow an "and" type relationship, rather than an "or" type) or explicitly define paths (stacked waypoints are not a good way) Such a clone would allow me to write such interface extensions and perhaps some AI enhancements. I guess most of strategy types will prefer that to the original (provided a nice BNet alternative exists) perhaps including you.
Your assertion is true, while your reasons are not. A molecule, by definition, is made up of different kinds of atoms (that is, different elements.) Diamond is made up of carbon only, so it is an allotrope (sp?) of carbon not a molecule made up of carbon. OTOH you definetly not have to be able to write molecular formula of a molecule, even in principle. A single polymer chain is *always* a single molecule, but you rarely know how long a chain is, consequently you can't spell its molecular formula out in usual cases.
I don't know. Usually, everything made of a heavily crosslinked polymer with in-situ polymerisation is a single molecule, while all other cases are collections of molecules. Latex condoms probably fail on both accounts but I don't really know how they are produced nor how much crosslinked their latex is.
Not necessarily. Consider a polymer made of quad-functional monomer, where steric properties of molecule makes it unlikely that two monomers can match each other on all functionalities (which is normally the case) then it is exceeedingly unlikely that two then-monomers in the bowling ball are ucnonnected in the polymer matrix after vulcanization.
Slashdot Mirror
Harddisk storage space have grown roughly by a factor of ten million in the last 20 years. With the same rate, it would take another 25 years before we need that amount. I'm pretty sure kernel 4.0 will be out long before that.
I don't mean to say P4 is not competetive with G4, actually it is way faster. Even faster are Athlons, just not in SSE2/Altivec optimizable stuff (since they can't do SSE2.) If P4 or Opteron based Apples come along they would also be very fast (like they did with G4s, software will be specifically optimized for apple hardware.) I just wrote this to clear up some confusion over benchmarks.
It doesn't. Period.
A config file is a config file, you can change it with vim or you can write a EliteConf gui configurator that leaves all options avaliable to you and that would be pretty flexible. There may also be a tool called EasyConf that does the job with significantly reduced flexibility and enhanced ease of use. EasyConf, EliteConf and vim can all be installed side by side. Although not a very good idea from an UI design POW, it is even possible that they are integrated (eg. Simple Setup/Expert Setup/Show Me Config File tabs) Had EasyConf for all programs existed, we wouldn't have had any issue with ease of use. Since unix config files are usually plain text files, there has never been a problem with flexibility either.
All the GUI has done has changed the knowledge from which option to use to which radio box to click.
Actually it is all about keeping underlying structure away from the user unless user wants to tweak it explicitly. Hiding less used options, finding good defaults and grouping options to a goal oriented setup is the key to EasyConf. Exposing all options with a GUI is EliteConf and does not improve ease of use in any way (except perhaps by displaying better baloon helps than comments in the text file.)
Then again, I don't live in or near the States. Local terrorist still prefer bombs and AK47s.
Easy mars mission requires either a breakthru in rocket technology (in that case US might go as well) or massive space infrastructure spending (IOW we have the technology to make Mars our backyard, but cost of building the infrastructure is far higher than just going to Mars a few times without it.) As it stands, going to Mars is hard, doable but hard. Nuclear rockets do not solve the problem and ion propulsion isn't even relevant.
I sincerly hope they prove me wrong; I want to see people on Mars before I die and I have no hope for a NASA or an ESA mission. NASA and American public in general lost the magic in manned space missions. ESA has almost no experience in manned missions and the way they plan things, this won't change soon. China has the money and determination. It is a matter of time before they have the technology. I guess our best bet is primarily a Chineese mission in 2030ties.
Also you already have a very good chance of recovery if you are a mouse with cancer. If one tenth of miracle cancer cures for mice worked for humans, cancer would have been a long lost illness.
I never used debian. I keep hearing apt-get is very good but I'm likely to stick with a source based distro after being spoiled with gentoo :)
Huh? I find installers for windows programs excellent as they do what they are supposed to do every single time. I don't recall a single instance of a windows installer failing. OTOH the best linux installer I used so far is emerge, and I had 4 serious problems with it in just 3 weeks. Second best linux installer (urpmi) was really horrible. Either you use a very good linux installer, or you use very strong stuff to get high o have such a twisted view of linux vs. windows installers. Which one is it?
Ofcourse this assumes complex chemistry is required for life. I think this is a fairly good assumption.
You should better evaluate whether your hypothesis about coin being fair is true much earlier than 10000000 tosses. Suppose that your "quarter" actually has two heads side, and you would notice such an oddity with 0.9999999999 probability. Also there is 0.000000000001 probability that coin is rigged in some other way. What can be said about outcome of next toss? p(Heads)=1. With an unlimited precision maths library you can have a lot of 9s, after "0." instead of a boring "1", if you are so inclined.
Never heard of selection bias, did you? Those probabilities about life and intelligent life are not infinitesmall, infact at least one of them seems to be just 1 (probability of primitive life.) For a non-zero probability of evolution of those primitive beings into intelligent life, selection bias kicks in, and we are destined to be "here", for we can't wonder about probability of intelligent lifes if we are not already an intelligent life form.
I guess movie -which I haven't watched yet- is substantially different from the short story -which I've read. The answer is simple, by commiting a crime, they are criminals. And they already had committed the murder. The fact that time of the murder they have committed lies in the future at time of arrest is irrelevant. By preempting the murder with arrest, they do not avoid the crime itself, they just push the crime to an alternative timeline. Precogs do not predict the murder, they witness it.
Perhaps you should check uae-jit patch (which has been ported to basillisk and integrated into win series of uae) before concluding jit based 68s emulation is not practical.
Did you try just setting PPC options in make.conf and emerging system from stage 2?
The common property of all those nuts coming along is:
a) They are usually credible guys and real scientists. Their specific theories may not have the same credibility, but most often than not they would agree with other scientists and vice versa.
b) Their ideas are not entirely incompatible with modern physics. Usually they are investigating non-orthodox interpretations of the current theories. In non-limiting cases, their theories and current theories lead to same observations.
c) They make experimentally testable claims. Most experiments are also low budget.
d) If their claims are found to be true, resulting utility is enormous.
This is what I would call a good gamble. But it is not my money, so it is not my call.
No text but decoy for lameness filter.
I keep seeing comments like this and understand that you people have really serious things to do with your computers, but aren't you overestimating stability needs of people like me, the home user? I never ever had a serious problem with 2.4.x series, and I used almost all of them. Despite huge changelog, I don't think 2.4.19 is any worse. Infact, considering how much revisions 2.4.19 has gone thru before going gold, I expect it to be more stable than -say- 2.4.14. The flux you are talking about has been backported from 2.5 series, and added to an already stable kernel. No need to scare away people.
I would like to have more intelligent units, so that I can concentrate on the war, rather than battles. Even with still dumb units, tactical burden may be lessened a lot. With current SC one can't give units times orders ("wait 2 seconds, then attack"), suspended orders ("nuke when orange trigger happens) conditional orders ("if you see 6-12 mutas, flee to base. Otherwise fight.") build armies (group commands follow an "and" type relationship, rather than an "or" type) or explicitly define paths (stacked waypoints are not a good way) Such a clone would allow me to write such interface extensions and perhaps some AI enhancements. I guess most of strategy types will prefer that to the original (provided a nice BNet alternative exists) perhaps including you.
Your assertion is true, while your reasons are not. A molecule, by definition, is made up of different kinds of atoms (that is, different elements.) Diamond is made up of carbon only, so it is an allotrope (sp?) of carbon not a molecule made up of carbon. OTOH you definetly not have to be able to write molecular formula of a molecule, even in principle. A single polymer chain is *always* a single molecule, but you rarely know how long a chain is, consequently you can't spell its molecular formula out in usual cases.
I don't know. Usually, everything made of a heavily crosslinked polymer with in-situ polymerisation is a single molecule, while all other cases are collections of molecules. Latex condoms probably fail on both accounts but I don't really know how they are produced nor how much crosslinked their latex is.
Not necessarily. Consider a polymer made of quad-functional monomer, where steric properties of molecule makes it unlikely that two monomers can match each other on all functionalities (which is normally the case) then it is exceeedingly unlikely that two then-monomers in the bowling ball are ucnonnected in the polymer matrix after vulcanization.
Opera 6 is much slower than Opera 5, that might be why you have a different experience than the parent.
AMD has a much higher market share now compared to 2000 solely due to success of Athlons. MS didn't contribute to that.
I suddenly felt sorry for the owner of joe@home.com