not that it makes any sense but at least it uses all the letters.
The thing is I dont reallyknow how good an idea it is to merge the three. What is a good idea is that things be consistent. This is more important in the mac world than others. Its why we like macs. its why for example we put up with having to drag disks to the trash or annoying dialog boxes. by forcing you do to things in consistent ways your productivity and abbility to manage more applications increases in the long run. with applications I want them all in one folder not sprayed allover my disk. I want my prefernces all in one place. etc.. for an example of how not to do things on a mac see GnuDarwin.
When they say "optical and analog audio" they are refering to the newer fiber optic audio connectors that are now standard even on the cheapest home theater systems. this is for Dolby (5.1, 6.1 7.1) audio no doubt. it has nothing to do with video or graphics.
at one point, recently, SCO owned trolltech. they wrote off the organization but did they write off the IP? Might want to think about that before using Qt
see this article in Forbes. They point out that SCO's parent comapny has twice before bought small compaines (e.g. SCO) then sued larger ones for the IP. For example they sued Microsoft and won. They sued another company that settled. Now they are suing IBM and will probably win even if no one in the linux world can beleive it. They owned troll tech: the SCO kiss of death of IP legitimacy.
here is just one of many such articles...no doubt you never saw this because it weas not in USA today, but instead in an actual scientific journal.
Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated June 6, 2003
Seeking the Roots of Terrorism By ALAN B. KRUEGER and JITKA MALECKOVÃ
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, a consensus quickly emerged that poverty and lack of education were major causes of terrorist acts and support for terrorism. Subscribing to that theory are politicians, journalists, and many scholars, as well as officials responsible for administering aid to poor countries. For example, James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, asserted that the war on terrorism "will not be won until we have come to grips with the problem of poverty and thus the sources of discontent."
The consensus is bipartisan. "We fight against poverty," George W. Bush said in a speech in Monterrey, Mexico, "because hope is an answer to terror.... We will challenge the poverty and hopelessness and lack of education and failed governments that too often allow conditions that terrorists can seize." At the other end of the political spectrum, Al Gore, at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued that the anger that underlies terrorism in the Islamic world stems from "the continued failure to thrive, as rates of economic growth stagnate, while the cohort of unemployed young men under 20 continues to increase."
Many well-regarded public intellectuals also concur. For example, Elie Wiesel claimed, "Education is the way to eliminate terrorism." And the Nobel laureate Kim Dae Jung asserted, "At the bottom of terrorism is poverty."
With such a strong and broad coalition in agreement, we asked, what evidence links poverty and poor education to terrorism? Perhaps surprisingly, the relevant literature and the new evidence that we assembled challenge the consensus. In a study we recently circulated as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, we considered support for, and participation in, terrorism at both individual and national levels. Although the available data at the national level are weaker, both types of evidence point in the same direction and lead us to conclude that any connection between poverty, education, and terrorism is, at best, indirect, complicated, and probably quite weak.
Full text http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39b01001.h tm
Lets consider an equally shocking fact. Terrorists have above average educations. (it's well documented, so let's not argue). Thus clearly education is not worth it.
likewise, the leading cause of premature death is accidents, mainly automobile accidents among young people. Thus clearly diving is not worth it.
Indeed we should all be on some prozium (see Equilibrium) and Drug Evasion should be a cime (see THX 1138) and our minds should be filled with Trivia (see Farenheight 451), because its a well established fact that humans are dangerous if not pacified. Clearly exploration, curiosity, dissatisfaction, and acting on ones ideas are not worth it.
SO maybe you want to complain that, well, heck, this is "dukes of hazzard" and "freinds" not master piece theater. Having these is not worth an increase in crime, etc... Really? so its okay for you to watch this but well it corrupts "other" people's minds. Right.
Is not Winows a generic term, not only for panes of glass, but also generic in the computer sense as well. Lindows thinks so and has a suit against MS.
Given that I've read here and elsewhere that *BSD has Linux binary compatibility then clearly by your argument they must have stolen it from linux and now must be GPLed.
They were writing SCO code while having the Linux code in front of them. That is a big No-No if you want to avoid violating the GPL.
Fishy, maybe, butI dont think its an unethical practice. Its considered fair for anyone to call GPL programs and routines from other programs. It's basically neccessary to actually read the GPL source when doing this since none of it is documented well enough.
The SCO folks were not even trying to call the GPL code, just figure out how to emulate it with their existing code.
Of course if they could not find a way to emulate some functionality they would have had to add it to the compatibility layer, and maybe they could have been tempeted to use the Linux source for that function. That might be violation true. But even here this would not be putting source into the SCO unix, just into the compatibility layer.
Sheesh did anyone read the article? If anything its more evidence AGAINST linux. GOT THAT! its more evidence that linux copied from SCO and not that SCO polluted its source with LINUX.
There are two salient facts in the article.
first the SCO engineers were not re-writing the SCO linux kernel they were simply writing stubs and wrappers for the SCO kernel to make an API (if you will) that looked like Linux on the outside and was actually calling SCO unix routines. they were NOT changing the SCO unix routines or making SCO kernel more linux like. they just wanted to allow Linux application to be able to execute in a Linux Personality Module layer that made SCO look like linux without having to change the SCO kernel
Second, in the process of doing this they noticed that many of the linux routines were identical to their SCO counterparts even down to the variable names!!. At the time the engineers thought this was dandy since it meant the the layer could just call the analogous SCO routine without any modification. I guess it took a while for it to dawn on someone that this also suggests that Linux may have been copied from SCO's kernel. (or mutually from a third source).
But the point is they were seeing identical code in linux and the activity they were conducting would not have lead to putting linux code into the sco kernel. This is bad for linux.
And since they were not making changes to the linux kernel --they were just making a layer that emulated it on top of the sco kernel-- they did not violate the GPL. there is nothing that needed to release nor any copy rights they needed to cite.
the ONLY thing one might think here that is at all suscpiscios is as a result of this excersize the SCO enegnieers became really familiar with linux routines at a high level of detail. but this is not a crime and does not suggest they copied from it. their observation of the similarity and the purpose of the project suggests the opposit infact. sounds bad for linux.
hmmm....maybe this guy is actually clever. He gets massive press coverage when ms sues and thenhe changes his name to UnrealPC or something and everyon now knows that UNrealPC is really realPC. good way to laubder brand loyalty to associate it with a new product.
the thing is I somehow doubt your claim. as I recall softPC and virtualPC were competitors being sold at the same time for a while. They supposedly worked on differtent principles with VirtualPC running windows near native emulating the CPU while softPC focused more on emulating windows with ppc native repalcements for the API. maybe i'm wrong.
rxvt 2.7.8-2 VT102 emulator for X11
rxvt-ml 2.7.8-2 VT102 emulator for X11 with multi-language support
this too is X windows unfortunately.
personally I actually like apples terminal with one scarey exception: it runs in a single process so if the terminal app crashes you lose ALL of your terminals! yikes.
I've never understood what the attraction of php over perl is, maybe someone could explain. When I look at the two of them it looks like for simple pages they are about equal: peanut butter in chocolate verus chocolate in peanut butter.
For example, php embeds code-like active statements in between static html. where as perl embeds HTML text in between perl commands. Each of them requires designated separators to keep the text and commands separated.
to be a little more specific, since perl had HERE statements one can have an entire perl cgi script that basically looks like a an html page:
sample perl cgi script: print HERE1 # slashdot wont print the less than signs this is a bunch of html here..... HERE1
$d = 4.5 # some perl commands
print HERE2 # slashdot wont show the less than signs more $d lines of perl HERE2
I dont see how the separators in perl between HTML text and perl commands add any bulk or inconvnience. Yet perl can do so much more than PHP.
hence my orignal query. What am I missing here. why is there any preference for PHP? is i somehow faster or lighter weight on APACHE? (that say fastCGI is not). I'm stumped. someone please explain!
if its fair use for musicians to a "sample" snippets of each other's code maybe its okay in software too. 80 lines out of tens of thousands is about the same the interval that a sample occupies in a 2 minute song.
on a more serious note, could some lawyer answer the question of what pre-trial obligations SCO has to give the LINUX community a chance to rectify the errors. I've read that no actually dmamages can be claimed until the copyright infringement is made known to the offending party. As it is SCO seems to be deliberately letting LINUX twist in the wind a bit as a sort of black mail scheme.
We all know the resolution of this is that before the next release of the kernel all the offending code will be erased and LINUX developers and users will not be liable for any future damages. Thus SCO's actions seem gratuitous and the trial largely moot.
I dont know a lot about gordon bell so I cant critisize his work. but I do know that the bell prize is based on gigaflops per dollar. this creates computers that shortchange interconnection speed and parallelism for raw gigflops.
this is not what high performance computing is about. this is the class of problems that are embarassingly parallel and dont need good disk access. in short pointless benchmarks like computing pi rather than solving real tightly coupled physics probelms like say asteroid impacts, or molecular dynamics. or problems where processors have to access the disk a lot, or share data.
This is such a no brainer its pathetic. The fed gov SHOULD NOT abandon ultra-fast super computing in place of mega beowulf clusters.
Research on building Mega beowulf clusters is a legit govt activity and so is building some. But the beauty of the beowulf cluster is that it is affordable to bussinesses, acadmeics and govt, plus its very adaptable to budgets and interconnection schema (fast, slow, grid, scavenger).
but beowulf clusters wont replace the need for super fast, super scalable, computers with well architected interconnects. there are lots of problems in this class, mostly physics simulation, that just cant be done well on beowulf clusters.
I should probably note that my own work involves large computer clusters. However my probelms (in biology) are in fact well suited for beowulf clsters. thus I'm happy to hear of more money for beowulf computing. but frankly I think that this should be in addition to the fast computers.
the flip side here is that it might be the case that money for fast computer resources is not being well spent as it could be at present. there seems to be too much emphasis on "landing the contract" for the computer center than on building a good design. congress via DOE tends to doll these things out in a political fashion making sure each big client gets funding for a center rather than letting the best center get the most contracts. as a result some of the so-called super computers may be just glofied too-expensive-per-cpu unscalable systems already that could be eclipsed by a comparable low cost beowulf system.
but that being said its still an area that the gov needs to fund since it wont drive itself commercially but its needed for lots of science and simulation.
The dam will ultimately be able to crank out 18,200 megawatts of energy a year, the equivalent of 26 nuclear power plants or 10 big coal-fired power stations burning 50 million tons of coal.
or about 36 watts per person! China better invest in transmeta or low power dragon cpus if they ever want to make computers ubiquitous. However because of falling energy prices in china, its unlikely the overrun cost of this damn will be recouped quickly, making future investments in energy production in doubt.
With as much water as Lake Superior, the reservoir will stretch 385 miles east to west and more than one mile north to south and 600 feet deep. unlike lake superior all of this water is held back from a lower flood plain by a single entity--the dam. THis could be a spectacular flood if it breeched.
but there's reason to worry. small cracks are appearing in the damn and construction officials arrested for corruption. 60 percent of the waste entering the reservoir comes from sources that can't be treated, such as fields laden with fertilizer and insecticide. Of the 90 tributaries entering the reservoir, 60 are now considered heavily polluted. It may well become a cesspool the size of lake superior.
One might also worry how this will shift the eco system and farmland down stream. THe river has traditionally created havoc with its floods but presumably also renewed farmlands and sustained eco systems down stream.
Godel's theorem in a nut shell: you cant prove inconsistency in any set of axioms within the context of those axioms.
suppose for a moment that this is a simulation with a finite amount of memory to parameterize the "world". the state of this system is propgated from time slice to time slice by some set of finite difference equations. well this means that everything is perfectly self-consistent. if you devise any experiment within the simulation itself to measure any observable then you will discover it is self consistent. The laws of nature a person living there would formulate would in fact be the correct ones for that system. you would never be able to discover an inconsistency.
consider for example QM. basically in a quantum world there ARE limits on resolution. indeed the limits are surprisingly like how one creates a simulation. for example, in any practical 3-D game the voxels of distant objects have larger volumes than the close by ones that you can see more clearly. likewise fast moving objects in the background are less precisely placed from frame to frame while maintaining on average an accurate speed.
its as though someone gridded the game in such a way as to have hyper cubes of constant delta-P time delta-X. hey wadda ya know that's the heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Indeed its easier to simulate a trajectory if you dont have to do it exactly. simply compute the approximate result with error bars and then any time the result is closely inspected you return a different sample from the approximate distribution. Thus one does not have to memo-ize everthing the game player has looked at carefully, you can recreate it on the fly each time something is inspected at high resolution simply by drawing an approximate sample from the distribution. The fact that two looks never quite agree is written off as the "hiesenberg uncertainty principle", or to the QM notion that inspecting an object can change its state.
Another hiesenberg principle is the energy-time uncertaintly (to measure the energy of something precisely takes increasing amounts of time). Again this is in keeping with a simulation. to compute the simulation to increacing levels of precision will take more time.
and remember folks the simulation does not have to run in real time!
Finally to digress a bit. Just suppose for moment the supposition that this is simulation is true. then might it might also be possible that the people doing the simulation are also simulations. and so on ad infinitum. the interesting thing is that at each layer of this onion it seems to me that the plausibility that you live in a simulation increases. this is because with each subsequent layer the plausibility of sufficient computer power prior to extinction improves.
Maybe you got it backwards. maybe QM is a result of how the simulation is done. Imagine for example the "real world" is newtonian. and suppose the simulation needs to know where a photon lands. it could try to trace its trajectory. but it might be faster to compute only apporximately where it lands and fill in the gaps with probability and sampling.
indeed maybe the uncertainy in delta-x and delta-p is just the way the array that holds the points is discritized into rectangular pixels of non uniform size. This is for example how one does most 3-d graphics simulations. the voxels in the background are effectively much larger than those in the foreground. the simulated world is thus not uniformly grided. Similarly fast moving objects in the background may be imprecisely located in any given frame.
How does a router know what the intended purpose/application a packet is destined for?
Does not only the receiving computer actually know what applications have bound what ports?
Lets all celebrate with a moscow mule. Moscow idaho that is.
less than 20 million dollars
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
I wonder if anyone inside of AOL has run the numbers to figure out how much money AOL has spent on anti-spam measures, or how many customers AOL has lost due to the overwhelming amount of spam in their inboxes,
and compared that to the amount of revenue that they get from selling out their customers.
well lets assume AOL loses a net 100,000 customers per year who would have stayed despite other gripes, had spam not been out of control. Well then at $19 per month that's 228 dollars per year x 100,000 = 22.8 million dollars per year per year.
that is this is the rate of change of loss. if one assumes the average AOL member who would be bother by spam last say 3 years with the service then the amortized loss is 68 Million dollars per year (constant over time)
of course this assumes that the 100,000 number is correct. Presumably AOL also has people joining from other places, say MSN, that quit their providers too because of spam. And of course 100,000 was just a number ot get the conversation statered. Personally I would guess the real number is 10x less maybe 100x less.
Also as long as AOL is growing at a rate that is approriate to their cash flow they will actually be glad these people quit! that is, too fast a growth is bad for a company: you dont want to have to borrow money. often its better and more stable to raise it via stock sales and cash flow. thus as long as you are growing at your maximum rate you dont care if some people leave.
Jeez... did any one read the article? it is just repeating the rumor. It does NOT say that IBM is confiming its making the chip for macs. go back to work and clean the jism off your screen.
Nielson television rating system
on
The Searchable Life
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The Neilson television rating system, monitors what channels people are watching. But people subvert this system by just leaving their TVs on to prefered channels even if they are not in the room. (neilson of of course tries to combat this).
which suggest that a chafing scheme could be used to mess with the logs on my web usage.
for example, I have perl script that continously goes to random web sites and pretends to browse web pages 24/7. My own usage is potentially lost. and by random chance I will of course visit al queda web pages, child porn sites, and many other dark alleys of the internet and thus launder them at the same time. Of course this idea sucks for its impact on web bandwidth but I suspect that by the time it becomes possible to track everyones's moves in a data base there will be lots of bandwidth available too.
Another schema is of course Anonymizing things via encryption and bitTorrent like peer-to-peer access to pages.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is I dont reallyknow how good an idea it is to merge the three. What is a good idea is that things be consistent. This is more important in the mac world than others. Its why we like macs. its why for example we put up with having to drag disks to the trash or annoying dialog boxes. by forcing you do to things in consistent ways your productivity and abbility to manage more applications increases in the long run. with applications I want them all in one folder not sprayed allover my disk. I want my prefernces all in one place. etc.. for an example of how not to do things on a mac see GnuDarwin.
When they say "optical and analog audio" they are refering to the newer fiber optic audio connectors that are now standard even on the cheapest home theater systems. this is for Dolby (5.1, 6.1 7.1) audio no doubt. it has nothing to do with video or graphics.
see this article in Forbes. They point out that SCO's parent comapny has twice before bought small compaines (e.g. SCO) then sued larger ones for the IP. For example they sued Microsoft and won. They sued another company that settled. Now they are suing IBM and will probably win even if no one in the linux world can beleive it. They owned troll tech: the SCO kiss of death of IP legitimacy.
PLease make sure your next post is an apology:
... We will challenge the poverty and hopelessness and lack of education and
h tm
here is just one of many such articles...no doubt you never saw this because it weas not in USA today, but instead in an actual scientific journal.
Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated June 6, 2003
Seeking the Roots of Terrorism
By ALAN B. KRUEGER and JITKA MALECKOVÃ
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, a consensus quickly emerged that
poverty and lack of education were major causes of terrorist acts and support
for terrorism. Subscribing to that theory are politicians, journalists, and
many scholars, as well as officials responsible for administering aid to poor
countries. For example, James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank,
asserted that the war on terrorism "will not be won until we have come to grips
with the problem of poverty and thus the sources of discontent."
The consensus is bipartisan. "We fight against poverty," George W. Bush
said in a speech in Monterrey, Mexico, "because hope is an answer to terror.
failed governments that too often allow conditions that terrorists can seize."
At the other end of the political spectrum, Al Gore, at the Council on Foreign
Relations, argued that the anger that underlies terrorism in the Islamic world
stems from "the continued failure to thrive, as rates of economic growth
stagnate, while the cohort of unemployed young men under 20 continues to
increase."
Many well-regarded public intellectuals also concur. For example, Elie
Wiesel claimed, "Education is the way to eliminate terrorism." And the Nobel
laureate Kim Dae Jung asserted, "At the bottom of terrorism is poverty."
With such a strong and broad coalition in agreement, we asked, what
evidence links poverty and poor education to terrorism? Perhaps surprisingly,
the relevant literature and the new evidence that we assembled challenge the
consensus. In a study we recently circulated as a National Bureau of Economic
Research working paper, we considered support for, and participation in,
terrorism at both individual and national levels. Although the available data
at the national level are weaker, both types of evidence point in the same
direction and lead us to conclude that any connection between poverty,
education, and terrorism is, at best, indirect, complicated, and probably quite
weak.
Full text
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39b01001.
likewise, the leading cause of premature death is accidents, mainly automobile accidents among young people. Thus clearly diving is not worth it.
Indeed we should all be on some prozium (see Equilibrium) and Drug Evasion should be a cime (see THX 1138) and our minds should be filled with Trivia (see Farenheight 451), because its a well established fact that humans are dangerous if not pacified. Clearly exploration, curiosity, dissatisfaction, and acting on ones ideas are not worth it.
SO maybe you want to complain that, well, heck, this is "dukes of hazzard" and "freinds" not master piece theater. Having these is not worth an increase in crime, etc... Really? so its okay for you to watch this but well it corrupts "other" people's minds. Right.
People like this stuff.
Is not Winows a generic term, not only for panes of glass, but also generic in the computer sense as well. Lindows thinks so and has a suit against MS.
Given that I've read here and elsewhere that *BSD has Linux binary compatibility then clearly by your argument they must have stolen it from linux and now must be GPLed.
Fishy, maybe, butI dont think its an unethical practice. Its considered fair for anyone to call GPL programs and routines from other programs. It's basically neccessary to actually read the GPL source when doing this since none of it is documented well enough.
The SCO folks were not even trying to call the GPL code, just figure out how to emulate it with their existing code.
Of course if they could not find a way to emulate some functionality they would have had to add it to the compatibility layer, and maybe they could have been tempeted to use the Linux source for that function. That might be violation true. But even here this would not be putting source into the SCO unix, just into the compatibility layer.
There are two salient facts in the article.
first the SCO engineers were not re-writing the SCO linux kernel they were simply writing stubs and wrappers for the SCO kernel to make an API (if you will) that looked like Linux on the outside and was actually calling SCO unix routines. they were NOT changing the SCO unix routines or making SCO kernel more linux like. they just wanted to allow Linux application to be able to execute in a Linux Personality Module layer that made SCO look like linux without having to change the SCO kernel
Second, in the process of doing this they noticed that many of the linux routines were identical to their SCO counterparts even down to the variable names!!. At the time the engineers thought this was dandy since it meant the the layer could just call the analogous SCO routine without any modification. I guess it took a while for it to dawn on someone that this also suggests that Linux may have been copied from SCO's kernel. (or mutually from a third source).
But the point is they were seeing identical code in linux and the activity they were conducting would not have lead to putting linux code into the sco kernel. This is bad for linux.
And since they were not making changes to the linux kernel --they were just making a layer that emulated it on top of the sco kernel-- they did not violate the GPL. there is nothing that needed to release nor any copy rights they needed to cite.
the ONLY thing one might think here that is at all suscpiscios is as a result of this excersize the SCO enegnieers became really familiar with linux routines at a high level of detail. but this is not a crime and does not suggest they copied from it. their observation of the similarity and the purpose of the project suggests the opposit infact. sounds bad for linux.
just tried the Gforce 2 from Nvidia. (stock card in the G4 I tested) this also did not activate the CrystalEyes Emitter.
the thing is I somehow doubt your claim. as I recall softPC and virtualPC were competitors being sold at the same time for a while. They supposedly worked on differtent principles with VirtualPC running windows near native emulating the CPU while softPC focused more on emulating windows with ppc native repalcements for the API. maybe i'm wrong.
rxvt 2.7.8-2 VT102 emulator for X11
rxvt-ml 2.7.8-2 VT102 emulator for X11 with multi-language support
this too is X windows unfortunately.
personally I actually like apples terminal with one scarey exception: it runs in a single process so if the terminal app crashes you lose ALL of your terminals! yikes.
For example,
php embeds code-like active statements in between static html. where as perl embeds HTML text in between perl commands. Each of them requires designated separators to keep the text and commands separated.
to be a little more specific, since perl had HERE statements one can have an entire perl cgi script that basically looks like a an html page:
sample perl cgi script:
print HERE1 # slashdot wont print the less than signs
this is a bunch of html here.....
HERE1
$d = 4.5 # some perl commands
print HERE2 # slashdot wont show the less than signs
more $d lines of perl
HERE2
I dont see how the separators in perl between HTML text and perl commands add any bulk or inconvnience. Yet perl can do so much more than PHP.
hence my orignal query. What am I missing here. why is there any preference for PHP? is i somehow faster or lighter weight on APACHE? (that say fastCGI is not). I'm stumped. someone please explain!
on a more serious note, could some lawyer answer the question of what pre-trial obligations SCO has to give the LINUX community a chance to rectify the errors. I've read that no actually dmamages can be claimed until the copyright infringement is made known to the offending party. As it is SCO seems to be deliberately letting LINUX twist in the wind a bit as a sort of black mail scheme.
We all know the resolution of this is that before the next release of the kernel all the offending code will be erased and LINUX developers and users will not be liable for any future damages. Thus SCO's actions seem gratuitous and the trial largely moot.
this is not what high performance computing is about. this is the class of problems that are embarassingly parallel and dont need good disk access. in short pointless benchmarks like computing pi rather than solving real tightly coupled physics probelms like say asteroid impacts, or molecular dynamics. or problems where processors have to access the disk a lot, or share data.
Research on building Mega beowulf clusters is a legit govt activity and so is building some. But the beauty of the beowulf cluster is that it is affordable to bussinesses, acadmeics and govt, plus its very adaptable to budgets and interconnection schema (fast, slow, grid, scavenger).
but beowulf clusters wont replace the need for super fast, super scalable, computers with well architected interconnects. there are lots of problems in this class, mostly physics simulation, that just cant be done well on beowulf clusters.
I should probably note that my own work involves large computer clusters. However my probelms (in biology) are in fact well suited for beowulf clsters. thus I'm happy to hear of more money for beowulf computing. but frankly I think that this should be in addition to the fast computers.
the flip side here is that it might be the case that money for fast computer resources is not being well spent as it could be at present. there seems to be too much emphasis on "landing the contract" for the computer center than on building a good design. congress via DOE tends to doll these things out in a political fashion making sure each big client gets funding for a center rather than letting the best center get the most contracts. as a result some of the so-called super computers may be just glofied too-expensive-per-cpu unscalable systems already that could be eclipsed by a comparable low cost beowulf system.
but that being said its still an area that the gov needs to fund since it wont drive itself commercially but its needed for lots of science and simulation.
The dam will ultimately be able to crank out 18,200 megawatts of energy a year, the equivalent of 26 nuclear power plants or 10 big coal-fired power stations burning 50 million tons of coal.
or about 36 watts per person! China better invest in transmeta or low power dragon cpus if they ever want to make computers ubiquitous. However because of falling energy prices in china, its unlikely the overrun cost of this damn will be recouped quickly, making future investments in energy production in doubt.
With as much water as Lake Superior, the reservoir will stretch 385 miles east to west and more than one mile north to south and 600 feet deep. unlike lake superior all of this water is held back from a lower flood plain by a single entity--the dam. THis could be a spectacular flood if it breeched.
but there's reason to worry. small cracks are appearing in the damn and construction officials arrested for corruption. 60 percent of the waste entering the reservoir comes from sources that can't be treated, such as fields laden with fertilizer and insecticide. Of the 90 tributaries entering the reservoir, 60 are now considered heavily polluted. It may well become a cesspool the size of lake superior.
One might also worry how this will shift the eco system and farmland down stream. THe river has traditionally created havoc with its floods but presumably also renewed farmlands and sustained eco systems down stream.
Godel's theorem in a nut shell: you cant prove inconsistency in any set of axioms within the context of those axioms.
suppose for a moment that this is a simulation with a finite amount of memory to parameterize the "world". the state of this system is propgated from time slice to time slice by some set of finite difference equations. well this means that everything is perfectly self-consistent. if you devise any experiment within the simulation itself to measure any observable then you will discover it is self consistent. The laws of nature a person living there would formulate would in fact be the correct ones for that system. you would never be able to discover an inconsistency.
consider for example QM. basically in a quantum world there ARE limits on resolution. indeed the limits are surprisingly like how one creates a simulation. for example, in any practical 3-D game the voxels of distant objects have larger volumes than the close by ones that you can see more clearly. likewise fast moving objects in the background are less precisely placed from frame to frame while maintaining on average an accurate speed.
its as though someone gridded the game in such a way as to have hyper cubes of constant delta-P time delta-X. hey wadda ya know that's the heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Indeed its easier to simulate a trajectory if you dont have to do it exactly. simply compute the approximate result with error bars and then any time the result is closely inspected you return a different sample from the approximate distribution. Thus one does not have to memo-ize everthing the game player has looked at carefully, you can recreate it on the fly each time something is inspected at high resolution simply by drawing an approximate sample from the distribution. The fact that two looks never quite agree is written off as the "hiesenberg uncertainty principle", or to the QM notion that inspecting an object can change its state.
Another hiesenberg principle is the energy-time uncertaintly (to measure the energy of something precisely takes increasing amounts of time). Again this is in keeping with a simulation. to compute the simulation to increacing levels of precision will take more time.
and remember folks the simulation does not have to run in real time!
Finally to digress a bit. Just suppose for moment the supposition that this is simulation is true. then might it might also be possible that the people doing the simulation are also simulations. and so on ad infinitum. the interesting thing is that at each layer of this onion it seems to me that the plausibility that you live in a simulation increases. this is because with each subsequent layer the plausibility of sufficient computer power prior to extinction improves.
indeed maybe the uncertainy in delta-x and delta-p is just the way the array that holds the points is discritized into rectangular pixels of non uniform size. This is for example how one does most 3-d graphics simulations. the voxels in the background are effectively much larger than those in the foreground. the simulated world is thus not uniformly grided. Similarly fast moving objects in the background may be imprecisely located in any given frame.
good point. also simulations dont have to be done in real time. and
How does a router know what the intended purpose/application a packet is destined for? Does not only the receiving computer actually know what applications have bound what ports?
Lets all celebrate with a moscow mule. Moscow idaho that is.
how much money AOL has spent on anti-spam measures, or
how many customers AOL has lost due to the overwhelming amount of spam in their inboxes,
and compared that to the amount of revenue that they get from selling out their customers.
well lets assume AOL loses a net 100,000 customers per year who would have stayed despite other gripes, had spam not been out of control. Well then at $19 per month that's 228 dollars per year x 100,000 = 22.8 million dollars per year per year.
that is this is the rate of change of loss. if one assumes the average AOL member who would be bother by spam last say 3 years with the service then the amortized loss is
68 Million dollars per year (constant over time)
of course this assumes that the 100,000 number is correct. Presumably AOL also has people joining from other places, say MSN, that quit their providers too because of spam. And of course 100,000 was just a number ot get the conversation statered. Personally I would guess the real number is 10x less maybe 100x less.
Also as long as AOL is growing at a rate that is approriate to their cash flow they will actually be glad these people quit! that is, too fast a growth is bad for a company: you dont want to have to borrow money. often its better and more stable to raise it via stock sales and cash flow. thus as long as you are growing at your maximum rate you dont care if some people leave.
Jeez... did any one read the article? it is just repeating the rumor. It does NOT say that IBM is confiming its making the chip for macs. go back to work and clean the jism off your screen.
which suggest that a chafing scheme could be used to mess with the logs on my web usage.
for example, I have perl script that continously goes to random web sites and pretends to browse web pages 24/7. My own usage is potentially lost. and by random chance I will of course visit al queda web pages, child porn sites, and many other dark alleys of the internet and thus launder them at the same time. Of course this idea sucks for its impact on web bandwidth but I suspect that by the time it becomes possible to track everyones's moves in a data base there will be lots of bandwidth available too.
Another schema is of course Anonymizing things via encryption and bitTorrent like peer-to-peer access to pages.