The "viewgraphs" indicated that things really got crazy with W2K.
So tell me, apart from USB support and the fact that they broke software tuned for the thread scheduler in NT 4 by monkeying with the priority boost, what does W2K do that NT 4 don't? I run apps and I write my own apps, but can anyone tell me what new features are supposed to be there?
Project Mohole was a kind of grownup's version of digging a hole to China. The idea was to dig down to the Moho (a simplification of the name of a Croatian scientist), the boundary between the Earth's crust and mantle, to learn what is down there.
The test holes were drilled on the ocean floor, where the crust is thinner, by a ship called CUSS I, and the project failed when Texas oil services firm Brown and Root blew all the money granted by NSF.
So, I am not off (your) topic -- mohole would be a perfect description for a diet Nazi.
Remove the tail, remove the rudder, yep I'd say the thing would be a little unstable. Make it a swept flying wing and the thing will Dutch roll like a falling leaf.
Furthermore, we are sending the FBI to your house, they will confiscate all your credit cards, bank books, and put a lock on all your bank accounts to prevent you from going into any more stores, and we will press charges in Federal court.
OK, the bugs cost 60 billion in whatever kind of disruption. What would it cost to produce software without bugs? With current understanding of software development, it would be big bucks, if the Space Shuttle software is any indication (and Feynman said it was the one part of the Shuttle that could be considered overall low-defect and well-managed).
If we have a free market, we are saying we will put up with $60 billion in hassle to perhaps get $200 billion in benefit and skip spending $400 billion to engage in (by current methodology) low-defect software development.
Put another way, spelling and grammer errors in Slashdot postings are bugs, but there is a tradeof between time spent checking everything and reading the postings of wisenheimers complaining about one's syntax.
Don't you suppose all that jabber on Tom's Hardware is wolfbane to keep the werewolves and vampires away? Do you suppose for a minute they believe any of it? Can we allow that they are making the ritual incantation in, perhaps a vain, attempt to keep from getting a restraining order?
Feminism and Global Warming
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 1
For the U.S. in the past 30 years, automobile mileage has doubled while public transit usage has tanked. A primary factor is the growth of female participation in the workplace. Not only are there twice as many commuters, many of the commuters (primarily women), are required to combine errands (picking up children from day care, shopping for food) with their commute, make public transit or other forms of ride sharing impractical.
I say we have to take the gender of anyone making pronouncements about global warming into account, and statements made by women should be viewed skeptically.
How much hybrid efficiency is in the hybrid part and how much is light, aerodynamic car on skinny tires with some advanced engine technology?
The Toyota Echo and the new Corolla have a similar VVT gas engine as the Prius, and Consumer Reports tests suggested that their real-world gas mileage was only marginally worse than the Prius.
Actually, the one time someone shook their fist was in Austria -- I was searching for a turn off on a 2-lane road and I was not accelerating fast enough for the taste of someone behind.
At 110 km in the right lane of the Autobahn in a late-model Renault, it would be smooth sailing until a line of cars would come up from behind and realize how slow I was going, these drivers would have to start down shifting to wind up their tiny 1.6 l motors to safely enter the left line without getting smashed up, and I could see them mouth words in Hungarian that I remember my grandfather saying when he was really upset.
And as for those low-displacement engines, a 1.6 litre engine turning 4000 RPM is much the same as a 3 litre engine turning 2200 RPM (typical American car such as a Ford Taurus or Chevy Lumina), and what counts is C_d A_f (1/2) rho v^2 with emphasis on the v (my American Taurus consumes 7 l/100 km at 105 km/hr -- the European Renault Scenic consumed 6 l/100 km on a higher-octane fuel at 110 km/hr with the testy Germans behind me -- one of the graduate students was making airport trips for conference members in a Scenic and I saw 8 l/100 km on his digital readout).
My point is that Germans value working hard, becoming wealthy, and spending that wealth on pursuits that consume hydrocarbon fuels (zooming down the Autobahn, uhrlaub in Majorca) and there is very little difference between Germans and Americans in that regard. If we were really serious about the environment, Germans and Americans alike, we could all adopt the per capita GDP of say, Croatia, where many of my relatives live and tell me that they are happy.
Germany, of the legendary unlimited-speed Autobahns, has these signs that translate "110 km/hr -- the correct (as in politically-correct) speed." Go ahead, try driving a steady 110 km (about 68 MPH) -- you will save about 20 percent on gas compared to driving the traffic flow, but you will have a lot of Germans shaking fists at you.
When Germans let me drive the speed recommended by their politicians on their roads, maybe I will let them lecture me as an American about energy conservation.
The scary part is the Hollings, Inc., is worried about subsequent digital generations of even a camcorder copy of a movie.
The only remedy to that is to prevent digital copies from a camcorder, even if it is for a legitimate, non-Hollywood content use, such as making low-cost digital copies of the images in a patient's medical record for the benefit of that patient.
If you think that consumer video/audio recording equipment isn't used clinically or in medically-related research settings (along with many other serious uses throughout our society), then guess again.
Simple, stupid but not efficient
on
Bitter Java
·
· Score: 1
I think the point is that the simple, stupid (i.e. clean) use of objects in Java can make it slow.
Roger Session (COM and DCOM: Microsoft's Vision for Distributed Objects, Wiley, 1998) (OK, this is from the pre-C# days when MS was going to have you do your GUI in VB, your business logic in the MS Java dialect-du-jour) goes on about "object pools", about how you don't create a new taxi cab everytime you need a ride from the airport.
I always wondered, what is so expensive about object creation anyway, and in C++ with "auto" objects, it is just about free. Java object loading, however, is expensive because unlike C++, they do not use a static VTABLE but have to check character string names against what is in the object. Java object loading is what makes you sit there twiddling your thumbs when an good sized Java app fires up.
So, to optimize a Java app, one has to leave clean, textbook OO behind and resort to tricks like OO's that "lazy load" classes as they are needed instead of at application start time, like the use of "object pools" to create object instances once and keep reusing them.
The word on the street is that Java is dog slow unless you optimize, it is slow because of class loading, and the way you optimize is that you use object creation sparingly in your inner loops, even if it makes your code look ugly.
I have not had this training and I defer to your experience. I concede your point that shooter games are not effective training for when someone can shoot back, and that all things being equal, these shooting-incident kids would not be a match against, say, well-trained police officers, and thankfully, that is a good thing.
Grossman (who I assume has had military training or if not would be exposed as a fraud) claims that it is really, really hard to kill another human, even if we get angry enough to threaten someone with a gun, not because of religion and social values but on account of animal instinct.
Grossman has been on the talk show circuit talking about how a lot of these shooters have killed or paralysed large numbers of victims by snap shooting, something he claims is hard to do unless there has been some kind of conditioning or practice to make it possible.
I gave away my copy of Grossman "On Killing" so I can't cite the exact reference.
The deal is not that the video games will make you shoot someone; the deal is that they teach you to shoot straight IF you get angry enough to shoot someone AND you get your hands on a gun.
Grossman's hypothesis is that by and large humans are not natural-born killers -- we are like Kubrick and Clarke's apes who stand around posturing and showing our teeth (road rage?) at other apes until we are taught how to kill. In other words, pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger is contrary to an animal instinct in us humans not to kill our own kind.
He goes on to argue that Civil War battle casualties would have even higher with the weapons they had if the soldiers could shoot straight instead of mainly over each others heads. He also argues that the American army will kick Third World ass in any kind of fire fight (18 American dead against hundreds of Somali fighters), not because of better weapons but because American soldiers have been trained to shoot-to-kill.
He again goes on to say that shooter games are pretty much the same kind of psych conditioning (shooting practice at human-shaped popup targets) used to train American troops.
With Columbine and now with the German tragedy, not only do you have kids acting on their rage with guns, they have the reflexes and deadly aim of a U.S. Special Forces soldier to kill so many so quickly.
The German tragedy suggests gun control is ineffective (access to illegal guns) and I suppose there can be access to illegal video games. But there needs to be some recognition of the effect of shooter games, not from some Moral Majority bluenoses but from someone who should know (Grossman, an Army Special Forces shrink), that there is a scientific basis to be concerned about their effect.
my_foo->Set_a() and my_foo_Get_a()
to your heart's content. Sorry, this does not work with virtual methods, but otherwise, you Objective C guys with your default behavior on NULL objects, eat your hearts out.
If you want to have some fun, check out
http://smallcomets.physics.uiowa.edu/www/faq.htmlx
for the believers side of the small snowball comets are bombarding the earth as we speak controversy -- for the skeptics, fire up your Google and do your own searching.
This Frank fellow saw these black dots on UV weather satellite images and though they were clumps of water delivered by mini comets hitting the earth. This mini comets are supposed to be house-sized fluffy snowballs, and there are a lot of problems with this theory -- why is the Moon not getting hit with these things, producing a thin water vapor atmosphere?
As pointed out, the SOHO comets are not the big honker Hale-Bopp style comets. If the Sun is bombarded with SOHO comets, maybe the Earth is being hit with Louis Frank comets after all.
The Saturn 5 was no Big Dumb (i.e. low-cost expendable) Booster -- I figure maybe a cool billion a shot compared to half that for a Shuttle launch.
Problem was the Saturn 5 was already paid for (million pound thrust kerosene engine -- didn't they call than the F-1?) while the Shuttle that replaced it required billions in development cost. Also, the Saturn could put 4 times the payload in LEO, making it half as expensive as the Shuttle per pound, and it could send stuff to the Moon.
Instead of punching around with the Shuttle in LEO and this Space Station which is the overpriced whatever, we could have kept Apollo going and evolving, and with the same money we have spent, we could have had a permanent human presence on the Moon by now.
What would that gain? Well, we could have a much more thorough evaluation of lunar resources (possible polar ice) and more thoroughly evaluated O'Neil's ideas of using the Moon as a source of construction materials for space-solar beamed power systems in geosynchronous or L-whatever orbits. Instead we are dinking around in LEO learning nothing.
The Big Dumb Booster by the way, was an idea to scale up the Lunar Module descent engine (had to be a KISS design to bring the astronouts down in one piece) -- they gave the job of building a prototype motor to some general construction contractors who didn't know the first thing about rockets, and they test-fired a successful motor. The thing would have been the size of a Saturn but much more cheaply (heavily) build -- payload would have been more in the Shuttle category, but the idea is that boiler and bridge makers could slap them together. Of course the Shuttle killed the idea.
Like Dell's got a 20" 1600 by 1200 for about $1600. No, I don't work for Dell, and yes, I would prefer a glass monitor because LCD's blow chunks when it comes to motion, although an LCD would be nice to stare at my source listings all day long.
My experience with templated stuff is that it is the greatest thing since sliced bread when it works, but compile-time error messages with templates can send you up the wall because the error messages don't tell you what went wrong unless you are a C++ uber-geek.
I think the problem has to do with the macro-esque nature of templates -- where it finds the error is buried in some symbolic expansion that does not back map to tell you what you did wrong. In an unrelated topic, LaTeX (a bunch of TeX macros) has much the same unfriendliness to its error messages.
For error handholding, interpreted good, anything macro'd or templated, very, very bad.
Isn't the whole idea behind SOAP is that every object can be stored, streamed, messages using XML packets (i.e. byte-stream files) so everything-is-a-file isn't that far off the mark of where everything these days is headed?
One approach to AI is indeed brute force whatever -- searches, tables, enumerations. If brute force does the job, so be it, and some may argue that the many parallel execution units (neurons) of the human brain are indeed brute force and intelligence is an illusion.
Kasparov beat Deep Blue by scoping out Deep Blues patterns of play -- Kasparov has the makings of a really, really good computer programmer. What happened next is that the IBM team tweaked Deep Blue and Kasparov lost.
Kasparov cried foul because he claimed that the IBM programmers were scoping his patterns out and adjusting Deep Blue accordingly.
He has a point, and it goes to the scientific integrity of claims of performance in many AI tasks. "Oh, the thing failed, we need to adjust the decision threshold here to get that case to work." Are the programmers really correcting bugs or are the programmers really playing Kasparov, of course aided by a really fast calculator because Kasparov is better at figuring out stuff in his head?
It had been suggested to me that true AI will be here if Deep Blue is able to adapt/learn/tune/tweak by itself without the programmers doing anything, perhaps losing initially but getting better with time.
The jewelry lady is really selling tokens to men redeemable for sex from the woman in their life. The jewelry lady has to boost the price. If my wife found out that I spent $5 on her birthday present, well, I will have to manage without sex for a pretty long time.
As for diamond jewelry, that is the selling of what is a reasonably abundant mineral if you are willing to dig a lot of rock in certain geologic zones, but there is this company called DeBeers whose business plan is selling this stuff to guys who think that can recreate their honeymoon with it.
Now, whether my home computer has a Duron or a P4 in it I don't really think is going to affect my wife's general satisfaction level.
There was this TV series called "Pensacola" staring Mr. Barbra Streisand as the commander of the Marine flight school. In the opening montage, one could see all that aviation aluminum, all that titanium, and of course that was just for the foundation garments for the fighter pilots' girlfriends -- we hadn't even gotten to the Marine F18's.
Slashdot Mirror
So tell me, apart from USB support and the fact that they broke software tuned for the thread scheduler in NT 4 by monkeying with the priority boost, what does W2K do that NT 4 don't? I run apps and I write my own apps, but can anyone tell me what new features are supposed to be there?
The test holes were drilled on the ocean floor, where the crust is thinner, by a ship called CUSS I, and the project failed when Texas oil services firm Brown and Root blew all the money granted by NSF.
So, I am not off (your) topic -- mohole would be a perfect description for a diet Nazi.
Remove the tail, remove the rudder, yep I'd say the thing would be a little unstable. Make it a swept flying wing and the thing will Dutch roll like a falling leaf.
Furthermore, we are sending the FBI to your house, they will confiscate all your credit cards, bank books, and put a lock on all your bank accounts to prevent you from going into any more stores, and we will press charges in Federal court.
If we have a free market, we are saying we will put up with $60 billion in hassle to perhaps get $200 billion in benefit and skip spending $400 billion to engage in (by current methodology) low-defect software development.
Put another way, spelling and grammer errors in Slashdot postings are bugs, but there is a tradeof between time spent checking everything and reading the postings of wisenheimers complaining about one's syntax.
Don't you suppose all that jabber on Tom's Hardware is wolfbane to keep the werewolves and vampires away? Do you suppose for a minute they believe any of it? Can we allow that they are making the ritual incantation in, perhaps a vain, attempt to keep from getting a restraining order?
I say we have to take the gender of anyone making pronouncements about global warming into account, and statements made by women should be viewed skeptically.
The Toyota Echo and the new Corolla have a similar VVT gas engine as the Prius, and Consumer Reports tests suggested that their real-world gas mileage was only marginally worse than the Prius.
At 110 km in the right lane of the Autobahn in a late-model Renault, it would be smooth sailing until a line of cars would come up from behind and realize how slow I was going, these drivers would have to start down shifting to wind up their tiny 1.6 l motors to safely enter the left line without getting smashed up, and I could see them mouth words in Hungarian that I remember my grandfather saying when he was really upset.
And as for those low-displacement engines, a 1.6 litre engine turning 4000 RPM is much the same as a 3 litre engine turning 2200 RPM (typical American car such as a Ford Taurus or Chevy Lumina), and what counts is C_d A_f (1/2) rho v^2 with emphasis on the v (my American Taurus consumes 7 l/100 km at 105 km/hr -- the European Renault Scenic consumed 6 l/100 km on a higher-octane fuel at 110 km/hr with the testy Germans behind me -- one of the graduate students was making airport trips for conference members in a Scenic and I saw 8 l/100 km on his digital readout).
My point is that Germans value working hard, becoming wealthy, and spending that wealth on pursuits that consume hydrocarbon fuels (zooming down the Autobahn, uhrlaub in Majorca) and there is very little difference between Germans and Americans in that regard. If we were really serious about the environment, Germans and Americans alike, we could all adopt the per capita GDP of say, Croatia, where many of my relatives live and tell me that they are happy.
Paul Milenkovic
When Germans let me drive the speed recommended by their politicians on their roads, maybe I will let them lecture me as an American about energy conservation.
Like, not everyone he scored with was female. I thought that Ganymede was a dude.
The only remedy to that is to prevent digital copies from a camcorder, even if it is for a legitimate, non-Hollywood content use, such as making low-cost digital copies of the images in a patient's medical record for the benefit of that patient.
If you think that consumer video/audio recording equipment isn't used clinically or in medically-related research settings (along with many other serious uses throughout our society), then guess again.
Roger Session (COM and DCOM: Microsoft's Vision for Distributed Objects, Wiley, 1998) (OK, this is from the pre-C# days when MS was going to have you do your GUI in VB, your business logic in the MS Java dialect-du-jour) goes on about "object pools", about how you don't create a new taxi cab everytime you need a ride from the airport.
I always wondered, what is so expensive about object creation anyway, and in C++ with "auto" objects, it is just about free. Java object loading, however, is expensive because unlike C++, they do not use a static VTABLE but have to check character string names against what is in the object. Java object loading is what makes you sit there twiddling your thumbs when an good sized Java app fires up.
So, to optimize a Java app, one has to leave clean, textbook OO behind and resort to tricks like OO's that "lazy load" classes as they are needed instead of at application start time, like the use of "object pools" to create object instances once and keep reusing them.
The word on the street is that Java is dog slow unless you optimize, it is slow because of class loading, and the way you optimize is that you use object creation sparingly in your inner loops, even if it makes your code look ugly.
Grossman (who I assume has had military training or if not would be exposed as a fraud) claims that it is really, really hard to kill another human, even if we get angry enough to threaten someone with a gun, not because of religion and social values but on account of animal instinct.
Grossman has been on the talk show circuit talking about how a lot of these shooters have killed or paralysed large numbers of victims by snap shooting, something he claims is hard to do unless there has been some kind of conditioning or practice to make it possible.
The deal is not that the video games will make you shoot someone; the deal is that they teach you to shoot straight IF you get angry enough to shoot someone AND you get your hands on a gun.
Grossman's hypothesis is that by and large humans are not natural-born killers -- we are like Kubrick and Clarke's apes who stand around posturing and showing our teeth (road rage?) at other apes until we are taught how to kill. In other words, pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger is contrary to an animal instinct in us humans not to kill our own kind.
He goes on to argue that Civil War battle casualties would have even higher with the weapons they had if the soldiers could shoot straight instead of mainly over each others heads. He also argues that the American army will kick Third World ass in any kind of fire fight (18 American dead against hundreds of Somali fighters), not because of better weapons but because American soldiers have been trained to shoot-to-kill.
He again goes on to say that shooter games are pretty much the same kind of psych conditioning (shooting practice at human-shaped popup targets) used to train American troops.
With Columbine and now with the German tragedy, not only do you have kids acting on their rage with guns, they have the reflexes and deadly aim of a U.S. Special Forces soldier to kill so many so quickly.
The German tragedy suggests gun control is ineffective (access to illegal guns) and I suppose there can be access to illegal video games. But there needs to be some recognition of the effect of shooter games, not from some Moral Majority bluenoses but from someone who should know (Grossman, an Army Special Forces shrink), that there is a scientific basis to be concerned about their effect.
Pay no attention to those other responses after I tell you this.
class foo
{
private:
double a;
public:
void Set_a(double a) {if (this != NULL) this->a = a;}
double Get_a() {if (this != NULL) return a; else return 0;}
}
declare
foo* my_foo = NULL;
and operate with
my_foo->Set_a() and my_foo_Get_a() to your heart's content. Sorry, this does not work with virtual methods, but otherwise, you Objective C guys with your default behavior on NULL objects, eat your hearts out.
This Frank fellow saw these black dots on UV weather satellite images and though they were clumps of water delivered by mini comets hitting the earth. This mini comets are supposed to be house-sized fluffy snowballs, and there are a lot of problems with this theory -- why is the Moon not getting hit with these things, producing a thin water vapor atmosphere?
As pointed out, the SOHO comets are not the big honker Hale-Bopp style comets. If the Sun is bombarded with SOHO comets, maybe the Earth is being hit with Louis Frank comets after all.
Problem was the Saturn 5 was already paid for (million pound thrust kerosene engine -- didn't they call than the F-1?) while the Shuttle that replaced it required billions in development cost. Also, the Saturn could put 4 times the payload in LEO, making it half as expensive as the Shuttle per pound, and it could send stuff to the Moon.
Instead of punching around with the Shuttle in LEO and this Space Station which is the overpriced whatever, we could have kept Apollo going and evolving, and with the same money we have spent, we could have had a permanent human presence on the Moon by now.
What would that gain? Well, we could have a much more thorough evaluation of lunar resources (possible polar ice) and more thoroughly evaluated O'Neil's ideas of using the Moon as a source of construction materials for space-solar beamed power systems in geosynchronous or L-whatever orbits. Instead we are dinking around in LEO learning nothing.
The Big Dumb Booster by the way, was an idea to scale up the Lunar Module descent engine (had to be a KISS design to bring the astronouts down in one piece) -- they gave the job of building a prototype motor to some general construction contractors who didn't know the first thing about rockets, and they test-fired a successful motor. The thing would have been the size of a Saturn but much more cheaply (heavily) build -- payload would have been more in the Shuttle category, but the idea is that boiler and bridge makers could slap them together. Of course the Shuttle killed the idea.
Like Dell's got a 20" 1600 by 1200 for about $1600. No, I don't work for Dell, and yes, I would prefer a glass monitor because LCD's blow chunks when it comes to motion, although an LCD would be nice to stare at my source listings all day long.
I think the problem has to do with the macro-esque nature of templates -- where it finds the error is buried in some symbolic expansion that does not back map to tell you what you did wrong. In an unrelated topic, LaTeX (a bunch of TeX macros) has much the same unfriendliness to its error messages.
For error handholding, interpreted good, anything macro'd or templated, very, very bad.
Isn't the whole idea behind SOAP is that every object can be stored, streamed, messages using XML packets (i.e. byte-stream files) so everything-is-a-file isn't that far off the mark of where everything these days is headed?
Kasparov beat Deep Blue by scoping out Deep Blues patterns of play -- Kasparov has the makings of a really, really good computer programmer. What happened next is that the IBM team tweaked Deep Blue and Kasparov lost.
Kasparov cried foul because he claimed that the IBM programmers were scoping his patterns out and adjusting Deep Blue accordingly.
He has a point, and it goes to the scientific integrity of claims of performance in many AI tasks. "Oh, the thing failed, we need to adjust the decision threshold here to get that case to work." Are the programmers really correcting bugs or are the programmers really playing Kasparov, of course aided by a really fast calculator because Kasparov is better at figuring out stuff in his head?
It had been suggested to me that true AI will be here if Deep Blue is able to adapt/learn/tune/tweak by itself without the programmers doing anything, perhaps losing initially but getting better with time.
Been to Toys-R-Us and seems a lot of people here in Madison, Wisconsin are Slashdot readers.
As for diamond jewelry, that is the selling of what is a reasonably abundant mineral if you are willing to dig a lot of rock in certain geologic zones, but there is this company called DeBeers whose business plan is selling this stuff to guys who think that can recreate their honeymoon with it.
Now, whether my home computer has a Duron or a P4 in it I don't really think is going to affect my wife's general satisfaction level.
There was this TV series called "Pensacola" staring Mr. Barbra Streisand as the commander of the Marine flight school. In the opening montage, one could see all that aviation aluminum, all that titanium, and of course that was just for the foundation garments for the fighter pilots' girlfriends -- we hadn't even gotten to the Marine F18's.