Right, but people were able to zap each other with electricity and make sparks and move compass needles and produce all sorts of other visible effects with electricity, even though they didn't understand the full nature of it. These new experiments are designed to try to detect gravity waves, because we haven't seen any evidence of their existence up until this point. (They've only be theorized.)
It's like saying the Navy is researching how to use the body of the Loch Ness Monster to power their aircraft carriers. Shouldn't the first step be to actually prove such a creature exists, and I don't know, maybe capture one too?? How far into your research can you really get when you haven't completed Step 1 yet?:-)
Several companies have tried to create a commercial grid software setup that pays users for their contributions. None of them have taken off. They have trouble getting customers because they don't have an existing user base waiting to crunch. (It makes your sales a little more difficult when you can't say "We can get started immediately." Instead they have to say "If you pay us money, then we'll be able to go out start trying to get all those end users to sign up.")
The end users meanwhile don't want to sign up to run endless amounts of "test packets" that aren't accomplishing anything. (They obviously don't start getting paid until there's actually customers to crunch for.) It also doesn't help that these companies' software was also kind of bloated and quirky.
The lure of being able to materially contribute to real science, in areas that are typically underfunded, by donating only idle CPU cycles is quite strong. People will do that for free. The minute you start making them focus on it as a business venture, they start getting very picky and a lot less tolerant.
I don't think you're wrong, I think there will be some pay-to-crunch type systems existing in the future. But I think they will only be branches off an existing donated network (like Seti@Home). I really doubt anyone will be able to start one from the ground up as a business model. BOINC might be a place to start, but it would need some serious modifications.
For one thing, the BOINC credit system is based on what the end users' computers self-report. Each client software runs benchmarks of its CPU, and then based on the amount of time it took to finish a Work Unit, reports back to the server how many CS (credits) it should be granted. To guard against cheating, the server will send out the same Work Unit to 3 clients, and all 3 clients will only be granted the smallest number of credits of what the 3 individuals claim.
It will probably work well most of the time, because you have millions of users, and no real incentive for most of them to cheat. The probability of the same packet being sent to 3 different cheaters is fairly small. (And even if all 3 WERE cheaters and got more credits than they deserved, it doesn't REALLY matter, does it.)
But in a commercial setup, 100% of your end users have an incentive to cheat. (If you're getting paid $1.50 per credit, it's in every end users' interest to claim as many credits as you can get away with, regardless of how long it actually took.)
But regardless, I think distributed computing projects are going to be taking off dramatically in the next few years, paid or otherwise. It's going to be pretty exciting to see the kinds of crazy things people will start wanting to crunch with it.
Which program is actually crashing though? Dump report and Dr.Watson only show up when something else has crashed, and if you've uninstalled Boinc it can't be what's crashing. So which program is actually crashing?
Ummm it just came out of Beta like two weeks ago... Either you were working with a very early version of the Boinc code, or else you haven't spent a whole lot of time on it...
Yes, there is still definitely a lot of work to be done on Boinc, both client and server side. But before giving everyone a blanket recommendation to avoid using something, you should at least waited until the first public release version before doing stability tests...
The US Navy is right now studying using gravity waves to communicate to submarines underwater
The project the article mentions is going to try to determine whether or not these waves even exist at all. How could the Navy be trying to manipulate something to be used for communication, when we don't even know if that 'thing' exists or not? Seems like you'd want to discover the existence of something before trying to use/change it...
A guy who did typewriter repair in the office next to us used to tell dim-witted customers who were unable to describe their problem well that "it sounds like there's a screw loose somewhere between keyboard and the chair".
Most of them never got it, and we'd die laughing under our breaths in the next room...
Damn it. I used to fully understand the relation between bits and bytes. But after reading your three helpful posts I somehow lost that knowledge and became confused again.
There IS no food. ANYWHERE. Doesn't matter how smart you are, or how much you "contribute" to your community or society or whatever...there's nothing to eat, period.
There's no food anywhere huh? Well obviously there WAS at some point for all of those billions of people to have moved to where they are in the first place. And now that there isn't any more food there, sounds like it's time to move somewhere else where you CAN grow food. Or figure out some new method of growing/raising food in that area. We have deserts in America too, we just don't live in them, asshole.
There wouldn't be over a billion people starving if the previous generations couldn't have found some kind of food. They survived long enough to have more kids of their own, didn't they? The original parent post was explaining how A) he found himself in a bad situation as a young child and had the determination to take deliberate steps to improve his situation over many years. B) The poor starving slobs you talk about also found themselves in a bad situation, and in turn had children that they couldn't afford to feed or clothe.
I say we try to promote more of type "A" people. If we just blindly continue to feed type "B" people, with no restrictions, with no insistance that they learn to try to improve their own situation for themselves, then we will only see the continued doubling of the starving population every couple decades. We (entire world) will eventually end up in a 'bad situation' where the "starving helpless" number so many that we can't physically feed them at all.
And when the hundreds of millions are starving to death instead of tens of thousands, we'll have people like you to thank for your 'insight' in making it that way.
No. There is no inherent sound from RF waves. It just happens that some dried grass and hair materials can be made to vibrate slightly when they are hit by certain frequencies of radio waves. The sound that they make does NOT imitate the sound of the event that caused the radio emissions in the first place. It is a very quiet hissing or crinkling sound. I've heard it while watching Leonids meteor shower one year. It is not an 'echo' of the giant explosions up in the sky.
Even if you were floating around in a spaceship, they are shielded from such emissions to protect the crew from radiation. So it's doubtful much would have gotten into the craft in the first place. And if any did, there aren't any masses of brittle dried decaying matter sitting around in a space ship either. At least there shouldn't be...
POINT IS: Just because there is no air, doesn't mean there is no sound produced...
No, no no no no. The plasma created around the meteor as it enters the atmosphere generates RF radiation outward, which causes grass/leaves/hair/whatever that are near you to vibrate, causing small sound waves which you hear.
The meteor, the grass, and your head are all inside the atmosphere during this activity, so it does not support your argument at all. If there were no air between the grass/leaves and your ears, you would NOT be hearing any sounds from the meteor.
If you were in outer space (like the camera views were on the show), and you were watching that same meteor hit the Earth's atmosphere, you would not hear anything. Nor would you hear nuclear bombs hitting the site of a battlestar...
(For the record, I did enjoy the way they handled the sound in outer space on the miniseries. But as far as total realism is concerned, there would NOT be any sound in real life.)
LeechZmodem. It was a mutation of the Zmodem transfer protocol that never sent an acknowledgment packet at the end of a transfer, allowing you to download an entire file, yet signal to the bulletin board system that you'd never received the complete file. End result: your file credits don't change. I doubt NASA cares, though.
"Yeah, ISS, this is Houston. We're not letting you download any more course correction data until you upload some more space porn! You keep forgetting that you have a 5:1 ratio to maintain..."
"And if you try that 'uploading of duplicate files' crap again, we'll revoke all of your existing credits!"
And the people who are interested in tweaking their box/settings to get more output for their SETI program read more into the site and find the links for the command-line only versions. Problem works itself out.
Not to mention that your "pea sensors" would be trying to analyze their surroundings at 90% of the speed of light... the data they send back probably wouldn't be very useful.
"Sir, we've got reports coming in from our pea probes. The planets in that system are very stretchy... and everything's all blue..."
Every human in the world could fit comfortably into Texas. Perhaps we will hit a limit eventually, in which case it would be nice if some of us could move offworld.
Yeah, if all everybody wanted to do was stand in one spot and not move around a whole lot. But all those people have to piss and shit somewhere, and I nominate you for being the guy who has to stand near THAT corner.
Nevermind the fact that you can't GROW anything on the land if people are standing all over it all day. And it's kind of hard to farm in Kansas if everyone in the world is standing around in Texas. So give up any ideas you had about eating too...
No, people really DO need to be spread out across the world in order to live "comfortably".
And the environment won't fall apart.
Well, we're still here...
Humans have only been able to have a real significant impact on the temperature and chemical composition of the air and oceans for about a hundred and fifty years... And there are more people living on this planet currently than the combined total of all people of all previous generations. Resource consumption and industry output is increasing at an exponential rate.
I don't think the fact that we're not living in the Matrix's "cloud world" yet means that we're not having a serious negative impact on the environment...
Suggestion for the future: Don't read Slashdot comment reviews of a movie that you really don't want to know spoilers about.
There are people who post here regularly who have made it their sole purpose in life to sneak in links to goatse.cx whenever possible. You're trusting this same class of people to give you ample notification before they give away spoilers for a movie??
In that case, I have some investment opportunities you might be interested in...
Well, it wouldn't be a full fledged discussion if we didn't hear from the Minister of Redundancy Minister.
You were so proud of that nicely formatted (and bolded too!) list, that you couldn't wait to post it again... and failed to notice that the parent post that you were mocking WAS AGREEING WITH YOU.
(I know someone who's a little trigger-happy... I propose a 3-day waiting period on clue-deliverance weapons. Down boy!)
First these "black boxes" are nothing more than a small amount of flash memory that is written to when the airbag system is activated. if your car has airbags, then YOU HAVE THE RECORDER. [Add ominous evil soundtrack here]
now, they record nothing unless the airbags are deployed. when they do they record vital data that the airbag system manufacturers need to continue to make airbag systems safer and save more lives...
Really?? So they have time travel capabilities as well... As soon as your airbag goes off they start recording, and somehow they know what happened in the 10 seconds before that... If what you say is true, then we'd end up with situations like this... "Hmmm, it helpfully recorded the fact that the airbag deployed, and then your vehicle was at a complete stop. Excellent! What would we do without the information this marvelous black box has given us?!"
So what d'ya think, maybe it's more likely that it's recording all the time, and just happens to stop when the airbags deploy?
(I know what you meant, just being a smart ass. And no, it is not a good thing to use these in court. They are secret boxes designed by car manufacturers for the purpose of protecting the car manufacturers financial interest, and they are not routinely checked for accuracy. They are electronic devices with crude sensors that have been subjected to a violent collision, but apparently that won't affect their ability to function accurately 100% of the time. Yet it appears they will soon be considered as unbiased, perfect observers in testimony against their owners. "We don't need to hear from the defendant, the computer in his car told us what happened, and the computer is never wrong." I'd hate to be in that kind of a situation... especially since I work with computers all day, and know how many possible problems can arise to cause erroneous output in any situation...)
Slashdot Mirror
Right, but people were able to zap each other with electricity and make sparks and move compass needles and produce all sorts of other visible effects with electricity, even though they didn't understand the full nature of it. These new experiments are designed to try to detect gravity waves, because we haven't seen any evidence of their existence up until this point. (They've only be theorized.)
:-)
It's like saying the Navy is researching how to use the body of the Loch Ness Monster to power their aircraft carriers. Shouldn't the first step be to actually prove such a creature exists, and I don't know, maybe capture one too?? How far into your research can you really get when you haven't completed Step 1 yet?
Well folks, there you have it. Anonymous Coward has declared it so. No need for further discussion.
Stop all funding for gravity experiments and go back to making some more of those wonderful bobble-head dolls. I can't get enough of them!
Several companies have tried to create a commercial grid software setup that pays users for their contributions. None of them have taken off. They have trouble getting customers because they don't have an existing user base waiting to crunch. (It makes your sales a little more difficult when you can't say "We can get started immediately." Instead they have to say "If you pay us money, then we'll be able to go out start trying to get all those end users to sign up.")
The end users meanwhile don't want to sign up to run endless amounts of "test packets" that aren't accomplishing anything. (They obviously don't start getting paid until there's actually customers to crunch for.) It also doesn't help that these companies' software was also kind of bloated and quirky.
The lure of being able to materially contribute to real science, in areas that are typically underfunded, by donating only idle CPU cycles is quite strong. People will do that for free. The minute you start making them focus on it as a business venture, they start getting very picky and a lot less tolerant.
I don't think you're wrong, I think there will be some pay-to-crunch type systems existing in the future. But I think they will only be branches off an existing donated network (like Seti@Home). I really doubt anyone will be able to start one from the ground up as a business model. BOINC might be a place to start, but it would need some serious modifications.
For one thing, the BOINC credit system is based on what the end users' computers self-report. Each client software runs benchmarks of its CPU, and then based on the amount of time it took to finish a Work Unit, reports back to the server how many CS (credits) it should be granted. To guard against cheating, the server will send out the same Work Unit to 3 clients, and all 3 clients will only be granted the smallest number of credits of what the 3 individuals claim.
It will probably work well most of the time, because you have millions of users, and no real incentive for most of them to cheat. The probability of the same packet being sent to 3 different cheaters is fairly small. (And even if all 3 WERE cheaters and got more credits than they deserved, it doesn't REALLY matter, does it.)
But in a commercial setup, 100% of your end users have an incentive to cheat. (If you're getting paid $1.50 per credit, it's in every end users' interest to claim as many credits as you can get away with, regardless of how long it actually took.)
But regardless, I think distributed computing projects are going to be taking off dramatically in the next few years, paid or otherwise. It's going to be pretty exciting to see the kinds of crazy things people will start wanting to crunch with it.
Which program is actually crashing though? Dump report and Dr.Watson only show up when something else has crashed, and if you've uninstalled Boinc it can't be what's crashing. So which program is actually crashing?
Ummm it just came out of Beta like two weeks ago... Either you were working with a very early version of the Boinc code, or else you haven't spent a whole lot of time on it... Yes, there is still definitely a lot of work to be done on Boinc, both client and server side. But before giving everyone a blanket recommendation to avoid using something, you should at least waited until the first public release version before doing stability tests...
Make some sense you crazy person!
A guy who did typewriter repair in the office next to us used to tell dim-witted customers who were unable to describe their problem well that "it sounds like there's a screw loose somewhere between keyboard and the chair".
Most of them never got it, and we'd die laughing under our breaths in the next room...
Damn it. I used to fully understand the relation between bits and bytes. But after reading your three helpful posts I somehow lost that knowledge and became confused again.
You should have stayed in bed today.
There's no food anywhere huh? Well obviously there WAS at some point for all of those billions of people to have moved to where they are in the first place. And now that there isn't any more food there, sounds like it's time to move somewhere else where you CAN grow food. Or figure out some new method of growing/raising food in that area. We have deserts in America too, we just don't live in them, asshole.
There wouldn't be over a billion people starving if the previous generations couldn't have found some kind of food. They survived long enough to have more kids of their own, didn't they? The original parent post was explaining how A) he found himself in a bad situation as a young child and had the determination to take deliberate steps to improve his situation over many years. B) The poor starving slobs you talk about also found themselves in a bad situation, and in turn had children that they couldn't afford to feed or clothe.
I say we try to promote more of type "A" people. If we just blindly continue to feed type "B" people, with no restrictions, with no insistance that they learn to try to improve their own situation for themselves, then we will only see the continued doubling of the starving population every couple decades. We (entire world) will eventually end up in a 'bad situation' where the "starving helpless" number so many that we can't physically feed them at all.
And when the hundreds of millions are starving to death instead of tens of thousands, we'll have people like you to thank for your 'insight' in making it that way.
AAA fire? Why, did they not pay their roadside assistance membership fee for this year??
Or do you mean Anti-Anti-Air fire? Sounds like something these Mars probes we're sending could use...
No. There is no inherent sound from RF waves. It just happens that some dried grass and hair materials can be made to vibrate slightly when they are hit by certain frequencies of radio waves. The sound that they make does NOT imitate the sound of the event that caused the radio emissions in the first place. It is a very quiet hissing or crinkling sound. I've heard it while watching Leonids meteor shower one year. It is not an 'echo' of the giant explosions up in the sky.
Even if you were floating around in a spaceship, they are shielded from such emissions to protect the crew from radiation. So it's doubtful much would have gotten into the craft in the first place. And if any did, there aren't any masses of brittle dried decaying matter sitting around in a space ship either. At least there shouldn't be...
No, no no no no. The plasma created around the meteor as it enters the atmosphere generates RF radiation outward, which causes grass/leaves/hair/whatever that are near you to vibrate, causing small sound waves which you hear.
The meteor, the grass, and your head are all inside the atmosphere during this activity, so it does not support your argument at all. If there were no air between the grass/leaves and your ears, you would NOT be hearing any sounds from the meteor.
If you were in outer space (like the camera views were on the show), and you were watching that same meteor hit the Earth's atmosphere, you would not hear anything. Nor would you hear nuclear bombs hitting the site of a battlestar...
(For the record, I did enjoy the way they handled the sound in outer space on the miniseries. But as far as total realism is concerned, there would NOT be any sound in real life.)
"Yeah, ISS, this is Houston. We're not letting you download any more course correction data until you upload some more space porn! You keep forgetting that you have a 5:1 ratio to maintain..."
"And if you try that 'uploading of duplicate files' crap again, we'll revoke all of your existing credits!"
And the people who are interested in tweaking their box/settings to get more output for their SETI program read more into the site and find the links for the command-line only versions. Problem works itself out.
Not to mention that your "pea sensors" would be trying to analyze their surroundings at 90% of the speed of light... the data they send back probably wouldn't be very useful.
"Sir, we've got reports coming in from our pea probes. The planets in that system are very stretchy... and everything's all blue..."
6.5 million huh... There's 2.5 times that many people currently living in the state I live in. Better check those decimal points again...
Yeah, if all everybody wanted to do was stand in one spot and not move around a whole lot. But all those people have to piss and shit somewhere, and I nominate you for being the guy who has to stand near THAT corner.
Nevermind the fact that you can't GROW anything on the land if people are standing all over it all day. And it's kind of hard to farm in Kansas if everyone in the world is standing around in Texas. So give up any ideas you had about eating too...
No, people really DO need to be spread out across the world in order to live "comfortably".
Humans have only been able to have a real significant impact on the temperature and chemical composition of the air and oceans for about a hundred and fifty years... And there are more people living on this planet currently than the combined total of all people of all previous generations. Resource consumption and industry output is increasing at an exponential rate.
I don't think the fact that we're not living in the Matrix's "cloud world" yet means that we're not having a serious negative impact on the environment...
Suggestion for the future: Don't read Slashdot comment reviews of a movie that you really don't want to know spoilers about.
There are people who post here regularly who have made it their sole purpose in life to sneak in links to goatse.cx whenever possible. You're trusting this same class of people to give you ample notification before they give away spoilers for a movie??
In that case, I have some investment opportunities you might be interested in...
Well, it wouldn't be a full fledged discussion if we didn't hear from the Minister of Redundancy Minister.
You were so proud of that nicely formatted (and bolded too!) list, that you couldn't wait to post it again... and failed to notice that the parent post that you were mocking WAS AGREEING WITH YOU.
(I know someone who's a little trigger-happy... I propose a 3-day waiting period on clue-deliverance weapons. Down boy!)
Really?? So they have time travel capabilities as well... As soon as your airbag goes off they start recording, and somehow they know what happened in the 10 seconds before that... If what you say is true, then we'd end up with situations like this... "Hmmm, it helpfully recorded the fact that the airbag deployed, and then your vehicle was at a complete stop. Excellent! What would we do without the information this marvelous black box has given us?!"
So what d'ya think, maybe it's more likely that it's recording all the time, and just happens to stop when the airbags deploy?
(I know what you meant, just being a smart ass. And no, it is not a good thing to use these in court. They are secret boxes designed by car manufacturers for the purpose of protecting the car manufacturers financial interest, and they are not routinely checked for accuracy. They are electronic devices with crude sensors that have been subjected to a violent collision, but apparently that won't affect their ability to function accurately 100% of the time. Yet it appears they will soon be considered as unbiased, perfect observers in testimony against their owners. "We don't need to hear from the defendant, the computer in his car told us what happened, and the computer is never wrong." I'd hate to be in that kind of a situation... especially since I work with computers all day, and know how many possible problems can arise to cause erroneous output in any situation...)
Bah! Sounds like a 'nethack' ripoff. Nethack is all the game you need. All games developed since then are just 'nethack with eye candy'!
Damn kids these days...
That's not really funny.
You're right.... it's god damn hilarious!
"For those wondering, there is more to it than you saw at the end of Reloaded."
I should fucking hope so, considering the 'trailer' at the end of Reloaded showed you as close to "nothing" as physically possible...
No, BitTorrent is working fine. We just don't like you.