Damn, the instruction set and address space on that thing is small enough that you can keypunch in hex if you want to - I did in an A-level electronics (not CS) class c.13 years ago, as an introduction to microprocessors. We had to write a simple program to control a set of 'traffic lights' - it could be done by loading/storing preset data, but was more fun (and faster, as if that mattered) to play with registers. IIRC, 0xA9 was the instruction to load the main register. I just looked - people still use those things!
So true. I've just sent my brother a CD of 'essential' stuff to put on the family's new Dells before they go online. Adaware, Spybot S&D, Zone Alarm and AVG should do for starters. It's a pity I can't d/l the latest service packs as well otherwise they'd be on there too.
In full agreement here. For documents that may need modification, plain text or html is easily pasted into the wordprocessor of your choice (not sure about RTF). For stuff intended to provide information only or as a 'final form', such as a resume, PDF is the preferred format anyway (I hear that it's difficult to alter a PDF, is this true?). If they can't read it, well, do you really want to work for somebody who can't even d/l Acrobat Reader?
If a documentary is really that important, then Moore can put it on Bittorent and watch the web links build up. If he wants to make money, though, then that's another story. I have no doubt that Moore would love to post a.torrent file for Farenheit9/11, but I couldn't imagine Miramax being too pleased about it.
What struck me most about Ken's rant was the absence of any mention of the GPL. The GNU project got a few words, but concerning what is arguably its most important creation, nothing. Instead, we have lots of blathering about 'hybrid source', implying that parts of the code are free and open (BSD-style open) and other parts are either closed, stolen, or both. This is nothing short of libel, IMHO, and OSDL if not Linus himself should be looking for a public retraction or, failing that, an libel lawyer. The GNU project has similar grounds for complaint, and plenty of legal brains at the FSF to back it up.
Ignoring this idiot's rantings will do the open-source community no good at all, forcing him to put up or shut up in open court will help immensely.
are smarttargetting.com, and why did I just reject a cookie from them? 3rd party cookies from slashdot? What next, pop-under ads at sourceforge? Fake 'dialog boxes' at freshmeat? I think we should be told.
Not understanding the whole picture here but how often would parts need to be retired? Obviously an inspection process would need to be in place to make sure everything is in working order and safe Would this involve numerous shutdown/startup sequences for maintainence/inspections? Interestingly enough, the lining of the reaction vessel can be both a service item and a source of fuel - if it is made from lithium, neutron bombardment creates Deuterium (Hydrogen with a neutron, atomic wieght 2) which can be fused.
A few years ago here in the UK, there was general outcry after a little girl was abused and murdered; it sparked off a number of demonstrations by people demanding that the public be made aware of the locations of known sex offenders. During this time, a paediatrician was hounded out of her home and forced to move because people incorrectly associated her job title with paedophilia. Yep, quite correct. This happened less than 2 miles from me. I was shocked at the ignorance of these people.
The real story here is that the investigation concerned followed the rules prevailing at the time and gained the evidence it needed legally and with the correct oversight, proving that the tortuously named PROTEECT Act is completely unnecessary.
And we're losing a guerilla war where we're killing 20 times more of the guerillas than they are of us (at least)? Yes, you(we) are. The war in Iraq is not against Al-Quaida, it is not against former Ba-athists and it is most certainly not against such a nebulous concept as 'Terror'. It is for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. It is not possible to win a guerrilla war by occupation or force of arms. It is possible to win by persuading and demonstrating to people that you are their friends. Compare the methods used in Vietnam before and after the operation was brought under the control of the US army. Compare that whole mess to the Borneo conflict ('What Borneo conflict?' 'That's how well it was handled'). And in case you think I'm trying to say the US army are meatheads and the British perfect gentlemen, look at Northern Ireland. We've made mistakes too. I only hope that Britain and the US (et. al.) can make a peaceful and dignified withdrawal from Iraq, leaving behind a government that has the confidence of its people and the respect of the rest of the world.
Normally I don't use my karma bonus. But in this case, fuck it, I want to shout.
Name a mainstream public figure who brands anyone "not being a huge advocate of US policies" a terrorist... Errrr.... Bush himself: 'If you are not with us [in the 'War on Terror], you are against us."
Nickel is expensive. Cadmium more so. In this instance, the industrialists and environmentalists are in perfect agreement - recycling is good and worth it.
I wouldn't mod down such an informative post, but I will reply. What have just described is an improvement in an industrial process. Whether or not it is computer-controlled it still involves doing something physical (intensely so in this case) to something that has physical existence. Something like Mushet's improvement to the Bessemer process.
No, region coding and staggered release dates contribute to copyright violation and file-sharing. Case in point. Finding Nemo had a DVD release in the US months before the cinema release in the UK. Result? Weeks before the UK cinema release I had an excellent (XviD) DVD-rip of the film. The kids (and I) loved it, and watched it many times. Now here's the important bit. Had the film enjoyed a simultaneous release in the UK and US, I would have bought the DVD, and considered it money well spent. I already own legit copies of Toy Story, Monsters, Inc.,Toy Story 2 and A Bug's Life. I could go out and buy the DVD now, but what would be the point? The kids have moved on to other things, and so have I.
For the chemically-challenged: CFC stands for Chloro-Fluoro-Carbon. That means that the compound contains Chlorine, Fluorine and Carbon. This compound is a Fluorocarbon - it contains no Chlorine. The C in the formula represents Carbon. As for the EPA, according to page 2 of the PDF, they are already considering it - and since the product was developed as a greener replacement for CFC-based fluids, it probably has a good chance of acceptance.
One thing which may soften the blow if a noob's Linux box is compromised is to ensure that the default 'noob' installation doesn't include all the useful tools that make Linux boxes such a prime target. If you can 'own' somebody's Linux box now, you have any number of useful tools/apps already installed to help in your use of that box - off the top of my head, ping, ssh, telnet, ftp, tftp, screen, nmap, netstat, uucp, postfix - I'm sure there are more. But what can be done with a box with no network tools and no easy way of installing them? OK, it doesn't help the noob - but it could make life easier for the rest of us.
There's more than graphics...
on
The State of OpenGL
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Am I the only person who thought that: "Over the next year or two, I think you're going to see a whole range of applications that use your graphics board as a supercomputer," Trevett says enthusiastically. was the most interesting part of the article? SETI@home, Finite Element Analysis, video recoding are all areas which could benefit from vector processing , matrix calculation and/or huge register sizes provided by GPUs.
Tried the BitTorrent download page? Windows, Mac and Linux are all supported, raw Python is also available for users of other OS/architectures. As for Java, this one's quite well known. C implementation as mentioned above here
From the description: BitTorrent suffers another problem in that the only usable implementations are currently only available in Python. The primary problem with Python is its excessive resource usage Really? I'm currently running four throttled BT downloads on a PII-350 w/64MB. Max CPU usage is 8%, load average 0.25. If you're really that bothered see here for an alternative. but other problems arise such as integration of the Python implementation into a native GUI frontend for a given platform Ever heard of WxGtk? RPMs for most distros, if it wasn't part of your default install. as well as the need to bundle the Python runtime with the BitTorrent client on most platforms as few deployed systems have a Python runtime available Now this is just silly. I dont think there is a linux distro which doesn't include Python libraries and even for Windows it's a single small executable. Besides (correct me if I'm wrong) but isn't one of the reasons for using Python that it has bounds-checking on arrays and is therefore proof against the cause of most exploits - the buffer overrun?
Who needs dedicated Nielsen families when you can instantly see what channel every single customer on your cable network is watching?
Sky tried this just over 4 years ago in the UK. Your satellite decoder box was connected to your phone jack - ostensibly for booking pay-per-view events, but it also 'phoned home' at other times to report your viewing habits. This connection was mandatory for the first year. Since I wasn't interested in PPV or having my viewing habits monitored, I disconnected it 5 minutes after the installer left. Nobody from Sky called to ask about it - I suppose noticing that it's down is admission that you're spying on me with it.
You are confusing temperature with heat. Going back to the engine/gas tank example, gas burns in an engine at up to 2300K. The reason your engine does not melt immediately cooling is removed is that this is the temperature of a gas. Gases are not at all dense, their molecules, their mass and therefore their energy is spread thinly. A candle flame reaches c. 1400K but can be touched briefly without injury or even pain. Touching boiling water at only 373K, however, will cause burns - the boiling water is more dense and contains more heat than the plasma of a candle flame. The plasma in a fusion reactor is even less dense by a few orders of magnitude, and even though its temperature is in the hundreds of millions of K, its energy is still tiny. Now the volume of plasma in the JET tokomak is c. 150 cubic meters. Let's assume a viable commercial reactor will be three times as big, with a plasma volume of 450m^3. The density of the plasma is c. 0.001g/m^3, so there will be a total of 0.45g of active plasma in the vessel. This plasma has a temperature of c. 2e8K. The specific heat of hydrogen is 14 J/gK[1], so the total energy of the active plasma is 1.2e9 J. Looks like a lot, doesn't it? However, in terms of heat, a joule is tiny. This amount of energy is sufficient to boil 6 tons of water, or to raise the temperature of JET's iron core by roughly 1K. So, quite a way short of melting the reactor, let alone the entire facility. As for a chain reaction back to the "storage area", forget it. For fusion to occur, the plasma must be contained. No containment => no plasma => no fusion. You can't contain a plasma in a pipe. Sure, you can keep it from getting out, but as soon as it touches the wall of the pipe, it cools down and is no longer a plasma, just a hot gas orders of magnitude away from fusion.
[1]Yes, I know about changes to H2 specific heat with temperature - orders of magnitude is all the precision we need here.
The worst that can happen is that it melt EVERYTHING within approx. 10 miles radius of the power plant I'm sorry, I just can't let this go uncorrected. A fusion power plant is incapable of 'meltdown' in any way, shape or form. Fission plants can meltdown because they contain all of their fuel within the reactor vessel (think "all my gas is stored in my engine"). A fusion plant, on the other hand has its fuel piped to the reaction chamber ("my gas is in my gas tank, at the other end of the car"). At any given point there will be less than 10mg of plasma in the reaction vessel. This is not enough to damage the vessel, let alone melt anything at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I just looked - people still use those things!
For documents that may need modification, plain text or html is easily pasted into the wordprocessor of your choice (not sure about RTF).
For stuff intended to provide information only or as a 'final form', such as a resume, PDF is the preferred format anyway (I hear that it's difficult to alter a PDF, is this true?). If they can't read it, well, do you really want to work for somebody who can't even d/l Acrobat Reader?
I have no doubt that Moore would love to post a
Instead, we have lots of blathering about 'hybrid source', implying that parts of the code are free and open (BSD-style open) and other parts are either closed, stolen, or both.
This is nothing short of libel, IMHO, and OSDL if not Linus himself should be looking for a public retraction or, failing that, an libel lawyer. The GNU project has similar grounds for complaint, and plenty of legal brains at the FSF to back it up.
Ignoring this idiot's rantings will do the open-source community no good at all, forcing him to put up or shut up in open court will help immensely.
3rd party cookies from slashdot? What next, pop-under ads at sourceforge? Fake 'dialog boxes' at freshmeat? I think we should be told.
Interestingly enough, the lining of the reaction vessel can be both a service item and a source of fuel - if it is made from lithium, neutron bombardment creates Deuterium (Hydrogen with a neutron, atomic wieght 2) which can be fused.
Yep, quite correct. This happened less than 2 miles from me. I was shocked at the ignorance of these people.
The real story here is that the investigation concerned followed the rules prevailing at the time and gained the evidence it needed legally and with the correct oversight, proving that the tortuously named PROTEECT Act is completely unnecessary.
Yes, you(we) are. The war in Iraq is not against Al-Quaida, it is not against former Ba-athists and it is most certainly not against such a nebulous concept as 'Terror'. It is for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
It is not possible to win a guerrilla war by occupation or force of arms.
It is possible to win by persuading and demonstrating to people that you are their friends. Compare the methods used in Vietnam before and after the operation was brought under the control of the US army. Compare that whole mess to the Borneo conflict ('What Borneo conflict?' 'That's how well it was handled').
And in case you think I'm trying to say the US army are meatheads and the British perfect gentlemen, look at Northern Ireland. We've made mistakes too.
I only hope that Britain and the US (et. al.) can make a peaceful and dignified withdrawal from Iraq, leaving behind a government that has the confidence of its people and the respect of the rest of the world.
Normally I don't use my karma bonus. But in this case, fuck it, I want to shout.
Errrr.... Bush himself: 'If you are not with us [in the 'War on Terror], you are against us."
Nickel is expensive. Cadmium more so. In this instance, the industrialists and environmentalists are in perfect agreement - recycling is good and worth it.
What have just described is an improvement in an industrial process. Whether or not it is computer-controlled it still involves doing something physical (intensely so in this case) to something that has physical existence. Something like Mushet's improvement to the Bessemer process.
this
* when fully configured
Case in point. Finding Nemo had a DVD release in the US months before the cinema release in the UK. Result? Weeks before the UK cinema release I had an excellent (XviD) DVD-rip of the film. The kids (and I) loved it, and watched it many times.
Now here's the important bit. Had the film enjoyed a simultaneous release in the UK and US, I would have bought the DVD, and considered it money well spent. I already own legit copies of Toy Story, Monsters, Inc.,Toy Story 2 and A Bug's Life. I could go out and buy the DVD now, but what would be the point? The kids have moved on to other things, and so have I.
when UDP has so much less overhead?
That means that the compound contains Chlorine, Fluorine and Carbon.
This compound is a Fluorocarbon - it contains no Chlorine. The C in the formula represents Carbon.
As for the EPA, according to page 2 of the PDF, they are already considering it - and since the product was developed as a greener replacement for CFC-based fluids, it probably has a good chance of acceptance.
OK, it doesn't help the noob - but it could make life easier for the rest of us.
"Over the next year or two, I think you're going to see a whole range of applications that use your graphics board as a supercomputer," Trevett says enthusiastically.
was the most interesting part of the article?
SETI@home, Finite Element Analysis, video recoding are all areas which could benefit from vector processing , matrix calculation and/or huge register sizes provided by GPUs.
As for Java, this one's quite well known. C implementation as mentioned above here
BitTorrent suffers another problem in that the only usable implementations are currently only available in Python. The primary problem with Python is its excessive resource usage
Really? I'm currently running four throttled BT downloads on a PII-350 w/64MB. Max CPU usage is 8%, load average 0.25. If you're really that bothered see here for an alternative.
but other problems arise such as integration of the Python implementation into a native GUI frontend for a given platform
Ever heard of WxGtk? RPMs for most distros, if it wasn't part of your default install.
as well as the need to bundle the Python runtime with the BitTorrent client on most platforms as few deployed systems have a Python runtime available
Now this is just silly. I dont think there is a linux distro which doesn't include Python libraries and even for Windows it's a single small executable. Besides (correct me if I'm wrong) but isn't one of the reasons for using Python that it has bounds-checking on arrays and is therefore proof against the cause of most exploits - the buffer overrun?
Sky tried this just over 4 years ago in the UK. Your satellite decoder box was connected to your phone jack - ostensibly for booking pay-per-view events, but it also 'phoned home' at other times to report your viewing habits. This connection was mandatory for the first year. Since I wasn't interested in PPV or having my viewing habits monitored, I disconnected it 5 minutes after the installer left. Nobody from Sky called to ask about it - I suppose noticing that it's down is admission that you're spying on me with it.
A candle flame reaches c. 1400K but can be touched briefly without injury or even pain. Touching boiling water at only 373K, however, will cause burns - the boiling water is more dense and contains more heat than the plasma of a candle flame.
The plasma in a fusion reactor is even less dense by a few orders of magnitude, and even though its temperature is in the hundreds of millions of K, its energy is still tiny.
Now the volume of plasma in the JET tokomak is c. 150 cubic meters. Let's assume a viable commercial reactor will be three times as big, with a plasma volume of 450m^3. The density of the plasma is c. 0.001g/m^3, so there will be a total of 0.45g of active plasma in the vessel. This plasma has a temperature of c. 2e8K. The specific heat of hydrogen is 14 J/gK[1], so the total energy of the active plasma is 1.2e9 J.
Looks like a lot, doesn't it? However, in terms of heat, a joule is tiny. This amount of energy is sufficient to boil 6 tons of water, or to raise the temperature of JET's iron core by roughly 1K. So, quite a way short of melting the reactor, let alone the entire facility.
As for a chain reaction back to the "storage area", forget it. For fusion to occur, the plasma must be contained. No containment => no plasma => no fusion. You can't contain a plasma in a pipe. Sure, you can keep it from getting out, but as soon as it touches the wall of the pipe, it cools down and is no longer a plasma, just a hot gas orders of magnitude away from fusion.
[1]Yes, I know about changes to H2 specific heat with temperature - orders of magnitude is all the precision we need here.
I'm sorry, I just can't let this go uncorrected. A fusion power plant is incapable of 'meltdown' in any way, shape or form. Fission plants can meltdown because they contain all of their fuel within the reactor vessel (think "all my gas is stored in my engine"). A fusion plant, on the other hand has its fuel piped to the reaction chamber ("my gas is in my gas tank, at the other end of the car"). At any given point there will be less than 10mg of plasma in the reaction vessel. This is not enough to damage the vessel, let alone melt anything at all.