Well, as yet quantum computing has a lot more to do with low-temperature physics than computer science, so it's not surprising that even if you were "into computers since you were a kid" you wouldn't be up on quantum computing.
There has been information-science work on how a quantum computer might be applied, but it has naturally been purely theoretical now, so again if your interest in computers hasn't extended as far as information-science theory you shouldn't be surprised not to be up on quantum computing.
It's not like Oracle is going to be advertising "Oracle 11i with Quantum Query extensions" any time soon..."
The computing power (for certain applications) is supposed to scale exponentially with the number of entangled qubits. If they ever get 16 qubits entangled, that would certainly be an interesting basis for future research. Anything less is kind of a toy. You'd probably need 32-64 before you start getting to the point of actual usefulness for specialized applications. Of course, when people talk about instant codebreaking, they are envisioning ~1000 qubits entangled.
Of course, the difficulty of getting n qubits entangled probably scales exponentially with n as well, so I think the whole notion of quantum computing will remain theoretical. Keeps some physicists in grant money, though.
I think its ridiculous when people act like there is some kind of symmetry in race relations in the US. A black person can't be racist in this country in the same way a white person is, simply because whites are the dominant/colonizing culture. If you deny this, you are being thoroughly pigheaded, in a way that makes others think you are trying to justify your own conscious or unconscious biases.
Defining "racism" purely as "making distinctions on the basis of race" is a ridiculous oversimplification, which shouldn't be hard for anyone to figure out, but it persists because it so valuable to closeted and not-so-closeted (white) racists.
Yes, blacks can be bigoted and discriminatory, but the social context is entirely different. Don't try to exonerate yourself by blaming the victim.
Point being, I like to play games in hi res (1280x1024) with 4 or 6 x AA and anisotropic filtering and maximum draw distance. The visual difference between enabling these features and not is far from negligible (for me) and you just can't play modern games (UT2003, Morrowind) with those settings on a $100 video card at more than 10 FPS.
If you really don't care how things look, or you only play older games, a $100 video card might do fine. And if you don't care how music sounds, or you only listen to talk radio, a $10 radio will do fine.
A $10 FM radio will give you all the sound you need. Sure, fancy stereos have lots of buttons and knobs to twiddle, but the difference in sound quality is negligible--especially since all we really do with our sound systems is listen to talk radio, right?
ATI has started providing a Linux driver with full 3d support. Unfortunately, it is closed source (Linux drivers for ATI have traditionally provided somewhat limited functionality but open source)
Only if you are doing purely vocational education.
If you are really trying to educate people on how to use computers, it's best that they learn that "how Microsoft does things" is not synonymous with "how computers work."
Sun is making StarOffice available free for Danish schools--that's pretty much all the story is. Not really news since Sun has been promoting StarOffice pretty widely. The schools are under no obligation to use StarOffice, and it sounds like there is no Linux involved at all (except the server from which you can download StarOffice)--it might all be StarOffice for Windows that is being talked about here.
As others have pointed out, we could pick up something that existed a few score or a few hundred years ago, and that would certainly be interesting.
Even knowing there was intelligent life somewhere else millions of years ago--and if the signal was millions of years old, it would necessarily represent an extremely advanced civilization, powerful enough to transmit a signal to another galaxy--would be extremely interesting scientifically and philosophically.
Finally, it is only conjecture that the "Window of Contact" is brief. For all we know, once civilizations get to a certain point of development, they last forever, and slowly but surely colonize all the inhabitable parts of their galaxy.
Only closed systems need go from a state of order to chaos. If a system has an external energy source (like the earth has the sun) it can go the other way quite easily.
As fas as open source applications that are good enough to compete with proprietary software, Gnucleus is probably the best Gnutella client for the end user--easiest to install and upgrade, best documentation, best UI, best user experience in general.
It's not used by everyone, but it's clearly good enough to compete with proprietary software.
Although mass extinction asteroids are quite rare, civilization-enders are somewhat more common, and ones nasty enough to ruin your whole day if they hit the wrong place (10 megatons) may occur as often as once a century (although more recent estimates put the frequency lower).
We'd probably have a lot or warning on the mass extinction ones, but it would be nice to know about and be able to deflect or destroy the much smaller ones, too. So we need an improving capability to detect near earth objects, and we need to develop a range of responses for detected threats--slow and steady methods for big asteroids where we have plenty of warning, but also a quick-launch nuclear option for when we spy that 50-meter rock headed for the eastern seaboard.
Compression within graphics boards is very different than other kinds of compression. They aren't really trying to make the amount of data you need to store smaller; they are just interested in making the amount of data you need to shuffle between the chip and the card memory smaller. They also know that in some circumstances (multi-sampling) the data is going to be redundant in very predictable ways. This lets them take some shortcuts that let them have good average compression ratios, lossless, with very low latency. The risk of very bad cases is small--people aren't going to run games where everything looks like TV snow--and the worst-case penalty isn't too bad.
AnandTech's coverage includes an nVidia-supplied benchmark that shows the NV30 beating the 4600 by 2.5x in Doom 3 (and the Radeon 9700 by about 40%). Of course, no one knows under what circumstances these benchmarks were obtained. I don't think any "independent" benchmarks will be available for awhile.
The threat was of miserable humans cowering in caves from robot hunter killers (like something from Terminator). The point is, this threat didn't have to come from any long-established, hidden menace. Leto was just showing what was probably just one of the myriad ways humanity could perish if he didn't free it by way of the Golden Path, ways that would have arisen from within the existing imperial society if Leto hadn't happened along.
The problem isn't dating the Atreides and Harkonnen animosity back to the Butlerian Jihad. The problem is putting the Butlerian Jihad a ridiculously long time in the past, thus giving it an artificially epochal importance which it wouldn't need if the new novel was in fact an interesting story.
I would argue that there is little internal evidence in the original series for placing the Butlerian Jihad more than a few hundred years before the events in the first Dune book, and there is some suggestion that both the Bene Gesserit and the Guild pre-date the Butlerian Jihad.
This is not really a big issue one way or the other for the GPL. MySQL is available with a GPL license, for use in GPL applications, or with a different license for non-GPL applications. Novell thought that some of their customers might want to build a non-GPL applications with MySQL and Netware, so they gave them that option by supplying the non-GPL license for MySQL. I mean, this makes sense; I would think that adding MySQL with the GPL license to Netware isn't much of a value add.
I'm a little confused as to how they can claim higher quality if these are going to be watermarked. Unless this is no longer the watermarking that is designed to still be detectable after MP3 compression?
I agree that multi-channel is nice for classical and jazz and other music that is supposed to sound "live". But the vast majority of music sold is mixed to an arbitrary standard of "sounding good" through headphones or reference speakers. If you're doing that anyway, and you want to throw in some spatial effects-- which, remember, will be as arbitrary as any other effect added in the studio--just use the appropriate and well-known digital filters that give a 3-d impression. It's all the same when it goes in your ears.
Don't try running any of the C or C++ or even VB code people have slaved over for the past 25 years in the CLR. It just won't work without extensive re-writing.
The difference between the Java VM and the CLR in this respect is almost entirely marketing, not reality. The CLR does not magically let you run code written for other languages in its environment--the code has to be written 1) with portability in mind in a language with limitations that match the CLR's own, or 2) changed extensively to match the expectations of a CLR-compatible compiler.
My problem with.Net is not with its technology--which is superior to Java technology in some ways--it's just that.Net is late to the game without bringing a compelling reason to switch. The marketing reasons (multi-language support) are largely dishonest.
Slashdot Mirror
This is wrong. The center of mass is about 30,000 miles from the earths center, about 27000 miles above the earth's surface.
I don't know why your infoplease reference would be wrong.
Well, as yet quantum computing has a lot more to do with low-temperature physics than computer science, so it's not surprising that even if you were "into computers since you were a kid" you wouldn't be up on quantum computing.
There has been information-science work on how a quantum computer might be applied, but it has naturally been purely theoretical now, so again if your interest in computers hasn't extended as far as information-science theory you shouldn't be surprised not to be up on quantum computing.
It's not like Oracle is going to be advertising "Oracle 11i with Quantum Query extensions" any time soon..."
The computing power (for certain applications) is supposed to scale exponentially with the number of entangled qubits. If they ever get 16 qubits entangled, that would certainly be an interesting basis for future research. Anything less is kind of a toy. You'd probably need 32-64 before you start getting to the point of actual usefulness for specialized applications. Of course, when people talk about instant codebreaking, they are envisioning ~1000 qubits entangled. Of course, the difficulty of getting n qubits entangled probably scales exponentially with n as well, so I think the whole notion of quantum computing will remain theoretical. Keeps some physicists in grant money, though.
I think its ridiculous when people act like there is some kind of symmetry in race relations in the US. A black person can't be racist in this country in the same way a white person is, simply because whites are the dominant/colonizing culture. If you deny this, you are being thoroughly pigheaded, in a way that makes others think you are trying to justify your own conscious or unconscious biases.
Defining "racism" purely as "making distinctions on the basis of race" is a ridiculous oversimplification, which shouldn't be hard for anyone to figure out, but it persists because it so valuable to closeted and not-so-closeted (white) racists.
Yes, blacks can be bigoted and discriminatory, but the social context is entirely different. Don't try to exonerate yourself by blaming the victim.
If you are running 50 instances of NT Server on a single box, how many NT licenses do you need?
Point being, I like to play games in hi res (1280x1024) with 4 or 6 x AA and anisotropic filtering and maximum draw distance. The visual difference between enabling these features and not is far from negligible (for me) and you just can't play modern games (UT2003, Morrowind) with those settings on a $100 video card at more than 10 FPS. If you really don't care how things look, or you only play older games, a $100 video card might do fine. And if you don't care how music sounds, or you only listen to talk radio, a $10 radio will do fine.
A $10 FM radio will give you all the sound you need. Sure, fancy stereos have lots of buttons and knobs to twiddle, but the difference in sound quality is negligible--especially since all we really do with our sound systems is listen to talk radio, right?
ATI has started providing a Linux driver with full 3d support. Unfortunately, it is closed source (Linux drivers for ATI have traditionally provided somewhat limited functionality but open source)
I think Sun would be ecstatic if Microsoft offered a fully supported .Net framework for Solaris.
Only if you are doing purely vocational education. If you are really trying to educate people on how to use computers, it's best that they learn that "how Microsoft does things" is not synonymous with "how computers work."
Sun is making StarOffice available free for Danish schools--that's pretty much all the story is. Not really news since Sun has been promoting StarOffice pretty widely. The schools are under no obligation to use StarOffice, and it sounds like there is no Linux involved at all (except the server from which you can download StarOffice)--it might all be StarOffice for Windows that is being talked about here.
As others have pointed out, we could pick up something that existed a few score or a few hundred years ago, and that would certainly be interesting.
Even knowing there was intelligent life somewhere else millions of years ago--and if the signal was millions of years old, it would necessarily represent an extremely advanced civilization, powerful enough to transmit a signal to another galaxy--would be extremely interesting scientifically and philosophically.
Finally, it is only conjecture that the "Window of Contact" is brief. For all we know, once civilizations get to a certain point of development, they last forever, and slowly but surely colonize all the inhabitable parts of their galaxy.
Only closed systems need go from a state of order to chaos. If a system has an external energy source (like the earth has the sun) it can go the other way quite easily.
As fas as open source applications that are good enough to compete with proprietary software, Gnucleus is probably the best Gnutella client for the end user--easiest to install and upgrade, best documentation, best UI, best user experience in general. It's not used by everyone, but it's clearly good enough to compete with proprietary software.
Although mass extinction asteroids are quite rare, civilization-enders are somewhat more common, and ones nasty enough to ruin your whole day if they hit the wrong place (10 megatons) may occur as often as once a century (although more recent estimates put the frequency lower). We'd probably have a lot or warning on the mass extinction ones, but it would be nice to know about and be able to deflect or destroy the much smaller ones, too. So we need an improving capability to detect near earth objects, and we need to develop a range of responses for detected threats--slow and steady methods for big asteroids where we have plenty of warning, but also a quick-launch nuclear option for when we spy that 50-meter rock headed for the eastern seaboard.
Compression within graphics boards is very different than other kinds of compression. They aren't really trying to make the amount of data you need to store smaller; they are just interested in making the amount of data you need to shuffle between the chip and the card memory smaller. They also know that in some circumstances (multi-sampling) the data is going to be redundant in very predictable ways. This lets them take some shortcuts that let them have good average compression ratios, lossless, with very low latency. The risk of very bad cases is small--people aren't going to run games where everything looks like TV snow--and the worst-case penalty isn't too bad.
AnandTech's coverage includes an nVidia-supplied benchmark that shows the NV30 beating the 4600 by 2.5x in Doom 3 (and the Radeon 9700 by about 40%). Of course, no one knows under what circumstances these benchmarks were obtained. I don't think any "independent" benchmarks will be available for awhile.
The threat was of miserable humans cowering in caves from robot hunter killers (like something from Terminator). The point is, this threat didn't have to come from any long-established, hidden menace. Leto was just showing what was probably just one of the myriad ways humanity could perish if he didn't free it by way of the Golden Path, ways that would have arisen from within the existing imperial society if Leto hadn't happened along.
The problem isn't dating the Atreides and Harkonnen animosity back to the Butlerian Jihad. The problem is putting the Butlerian Jihad a ridiculously long time in the past, thus giving it an artificially epochal importance which it wouldn't need if the new novel was in fact an interesting story.
I would argue that there is little internal evidence in the original series for placing the Butlerian Jihad more than a few hundred years before the events in the first Dune book, and there is some suggestion that both the Bene Gesserit and the Guild pre-date the Butlerian Jihad.
I recall no such reference in the Frank Herbert-authored books. Do you remember when or in what context this gets mentioned?
This is not really a big issue one way or the other for the GPL. MySQL is available with a GPL license, for use in GPL applications, or with a different license for non-GPL applications. Novell thought that some of their customers might want to build a non-GPL applications with MySQL and Netware, so they gave them that option by supplying the non-GPL license for MySQL. I mean, this makes sense; I would think that adding MySQL with the GPL license to Netware isn't much of a value add.
Seems to be several of those in this discussion Please excuse the off-topic
I'm a little confused as to how they can claim higher quality if these are going to be watermarked. Unless this is no longer the watermarking that is designed to still be detectable after MP3 compression?
I agree that multi-channel is nice for classical and jazz and other music that is supposed to sound "live". But the vast majority of music sold is mixed to an arbitrary standard of "sounding good" through headphones or reference speakers. If you're doing that anyway, and you want to throw in some spatial effects-- which, remember, will be as arbitrary as any other effect added in the studio--just use the appropriate and well-known digital filters that give a 3-d impression. It's all the same when it goes in your ears.
Don't try running any of the C or C++ or even VB code people have slaved over for the past 25 years in the CLR. It just won't work without extensive re-writing. The difference between the Java VM and the CLR in this respect is almost entirely marketing, not reality. The CLR does not magically let you run code written for other languages in its environment--the code has to be written 1) with portability in mind in a language with limitations that match the CLR's own, or 2) changed extensively to match the expectations of a CLR-compatible compiler. My problem with .Net is not with its technology--which is superior to Java technology in some ways--it's just that .Net is late to the game without bringing a compelling reason to switch. The marketing reasons (multi-language support) are largely dishonest.