Don't the cellphone companies already have convenient ways for people to send video voicemails to each other? Not that their systems would do everything this new company is doing, but it would be a good way to judge demand... which apparently isn't very high. (Perhaps because cellphone networks don't have high enough bandwidth to make it sufficiently cheap yet).
But at least checks and balances have actually been pretty well accepted and implemented within a number of governments, including ours, up until recently. Right now we're backsliding. Not only due to terrorism, either; the confiscation laws surrounding the war on drugs are obviously unconstitutional, too, but for some reason nobody cares.
It seems fair that SGI, who was very big in the game not that long ago and can no longer compete, should be able to collect dues for their patented ideas.
If only you had said "legal" instead of "fair."
SGI did have their heyday. They had many good innovations, and at the time they also made a lot of money on those innovations for their employees and investors. That's all teriffic.
But now that it's over, what good will be had by forcing us to pay an "SGI Tax" on anything to do with graphics for the next N years?
Bias by the ratings board would NOT explain a drop in the ratings. A drop would require an *increase* in whatever bias previously existed.
Honestly, why would the US *not* be dropping in the ratings? This administration has truly increased government secrecy. And I don't think they would deny that, either, they are proud of it, because they sincerely believe that handing more power to the executive will provide the highest security.
Unless, of course, you subscribe to the crazy notion that life begins before preganancy...
In addition to defining when life begins, I think some people are uncomfortable playing with the building blocks of life like so many tinker toys - designer children, genetic improvements for the rich, eliminating the biological need for traditional families, etc. You can disagree, but you have to admit there are huge ramifications for (global) society. Birth control itself has had huge ramifications, from the embrace of non-traditional (i.e. child-rearing) lifestyles to the depopulation and resulting immigration-based Islamification (if that's a word) of Europe.
Exactly. I think this article is extremely ignorant:
Mr. Vamosi says shopping on the Web is not a great way to kill time during a flight delay.
"Where I'd draw the line is putting in your bank account information or credit card number," he said
You will have a very hard time finding any online shopping site that transmits a credit card number without SSL. If you find one, you shouldn't be entering your credit card number there, either from home or at the airport it makes no difference. (All this is assuming you're using your own laptop; you can't trust a publicly accessible Internet terminal for anything). Anyways, people don't steal credit card numbers by going to the airport and sitting around waiting for somebody to send one unencrypted; they steal them by breaking into a website and grabbing its database so they can get thousands at a time. Or they buy them at a few cents per, from somebody who already did that.
Precisely. Forbes should stick to pork belly futures. It would be humourous to revisit Forbes' predictions about GPL v1 and v2, had they even been aware of such things at the time.
Thanks, good cite. The US imprisonment rate is alarming.
And on the other hand, look at the bottom of the list... 10 nations with 0 imprisonments per 100,000 people!? How can that be? I am surprised to see Cuba, UAE, and Egypt there, I think of those as civilized nations. Do they have high execution rates? Do they just chop off your hand and set your free? Or do they simply let everybody run wild?
Thanks. I've looked into it previously, but bzip2 is so much slower than gzip, it swamped the gain from parallelism. (Of course the files do come out a little smaller). (Also it doesn't yet support pipe input, which is a real problem for backing up an entire disk).
That sounds somewhat like the blackboard architecture, have you looked into it? I agree that's much closer to how nature works. Imagine if all the cells in your body had to take turns:)
Gzip, like all bit-serial encoders, is an inherently serial operation. You can't parallelize it without either attempting to speculate (which may or may not help, and in the case of gzip is probably too fine-grained to give you good performance on modern machines) or running two gzips on two halfs of your files, which will not get the same compression ratio.
This is the problem with uninspired formalism. You throw up your hands and say "impossible," when a small (and very reasonable) compromise would yeild very useful results. Here's what the pbzip2 manpage says about that issue:
Files that are compressed with pbzip2 are broken up into pieces and each individual piece is compressed. This is how pbzip2 runs faster on multiple CPUs since the
pieces can be compressed simultaneously. The final.bz2 file may be slightly larger than if it was compressed with the regular bzip2 program due to this file splitting
(usually less than 0.2% larger).
I back up from one drive to another, so can push up to 50 MB/s or so into gzip. And yet if I use the --fast option, what you say is often correct.
In fact I was going to go on a second diatribe in my previous post about how my new dual-cpu computer seems more disk-bound than ever, but I don't have any good suggestions on how to fix that.
AMD is pushing multitasking, a model of parallel processing that will never do desktop users much good beyond a small handful of processors. (Yes I know you currently have 57 processes running, and no that does not mean you'd benefit from 57 processors). If AMD presents these silly examples like being able to play two instances of a video game simultaneously, nobody will see any value. Instead, AMD (and for that matter Intel) should be doing all they can to promote fine-grained parallelism so individual applications can easily harness multicore chips without a huge extra developer burden. All too often I am sitting waiting for a job and my CPU utilization is only 50% because the app can't use both cores. (Come on, where's dual-core gzip?) You can say it isn't the chipmakers' problem, but if it prevents me from needing their products, it is their problem.
After reading the article, I didn't see anything about a quad core CPU. Quad Father simply seems to be a dual cpu board with dual-core CPUs in it. That has been possible all along, no?
Remember, kids, iTunes != iTunes Store. If you put your own ripped (or pirated) music into iTunes, THERE IS NO DRM AND NO LOCK-IN.
I was responding to a post that said people buy iPods because they want access to iTunes. But iTunes the program without iTunes the store is no competitive advantage for Apple; any old mp3 player out there will play ripped or pirated music.
For most people, I suspect "better" means "works with iTunes"
But it's a trap! Build up an iTunes collection and you're stuck with Apple players, for life. Even if you think they're the best right now, don't you listen to any music you bought 10 or 15 years ago? How would you like it if you could ONLY listen to your 15 year old CDs on Sony players right now? They were the hot brand back then.
There is nobody in DARPA higher than the director, so "One position above the DARPA director" means "not DARPA." The Director of Defense Engineering and Research concievably could, but when have they? Do you have a boss? When they say, "X is now my decision, not yours," do you take that to mean that your boss will decide however you want if you ask nicely?
It was DARPA's idea. DARPA's annual budget is $3e9 (check out the 7th page), and the few million they spent on the Grand Challenges was IME some of the best money they have ever spent. Why make it harder to repeat success?
It might be better if Opera simply maintained an client-side blacklist of fradulent sites/domains, which was updated in the background while the browser is running. That way they wouldn't have to track your browsing at all. If these fraudlent sites are verified by hand by people at Opera, there could only number in the tens of thousands.
I think there must be more to quick-booting than simply booting from a flash drive. Otherwise, the gains would be limited, and would require no special support within Windows (or Linux). I am getting the impression that Microsoft must be working on Vista to decrease boot times by starting services after login, or initializing hardware devices in parallel, or something like that. Perhaps they are changing shutdown/bootup to be more like what we now call suspend to disk.
Another possible advantage - if the disk heads in a laptop can stay parked 90% of the time, it should dramatically reduce the odds of a broken/corrupt disk.
As a Linux laptop user (yes, there are a few of us) super-fast bootup would be a very attractive feature, and an advantage now falling to XP. I'm curious how the boot time will compare to a resume from "suspend to disk" (though the attractiveness of suspend to disk / suspend to ram are limited by the fact that they're often a nightmare to set up anyways).
Slashdot Mirror
Don't the cellphone companies already have convenient ways for people to send video voicemails to each other? Not that their systems would do everything this new company is doing, but it would be a good way to judge demand... which apparently isn't very high. (Perhaps because cellphone networks don't have high enough bandwidth to make it sufficiently cheap yet).
But at least checks and balances have actually been pretty well accepted and implemented within a number of governments, including ours, up until recently. Right now we're backsliding. Not only due to terrorism, either; the confiscation laws surrounding the war on drugs are obviously unconstitutional, too, but for some reason nobody cares.
SGI did have their heyday. They had many good innovations, and at the time they also made a lot of money on those innovations for their employees and investors. That's all teriffic.
But now that it's over, what good will be had by forcing us to pay an "SGI Tax" on anything to do with graphics for the next N years?
Honestly, why would the US *not* be dropping in the ratings? This administration has truly increased government secrecy. And I don't think they would deny that, either, they are proud of it, because they sincerely believe that handing more power to the executive will provide the highest security.
Precisely. Forbes should stick to pork belly futures. It would be humourous to revisit Forbes' predictions about GPL v1 and v2, had they even been aware of such things at the time.
And on the other hand, look at the bottom of the list... 10 nations with 0 imprisonments per 100,000 people!? How can that be? I am surprised to see Cuba, UAE, and Egypt there, I think of those as civilized nations. Do they have high execution rates? Do they just chop off your hand and set your free? Or do they simply let everybody run wild?
Because except for airplaines, power outlets are ubiquitous.
Thanks. I've looked into it previously, but bzip2 is so much slower than gzip, it swamped the gain from parallelism. (Of course the files do come out a little smaller). (Also it doesn't yet support pipe input, which is a real problem for backing up an entire disk).
That sounds somewhat like the blackboard architecture, have you looked into it? I agree that's much closer to how nature works. Imagine if all the cells in your body had to take turns :)
In fact I was going to go on a second diatribe in my previous post about how my new dual-cpu computer seems more disk-bound than ever, but I don't have any good suggestions on how to fix that.
AMD is pushing multitasking, a model of parallel processing that will never do desktop users much good beyond a small handful of processors. (Yes I know you currently have 57 processes running, and no that does not mean you'd benefit from 57 processors). If AMD presents these silly examples like being able to play two instances of a video game simultaneously, nobody will see any value. Instead, AMD (and for that matter Intel) should be doing all they can to promote fine-grained parallelism so individual applications can easily harness multicore chips without a huge extra developer burden. All too often I am sitting waiting for a job and my CPU utilization is only 50% because the app can't use both cores. (Come on, where's dual-core gzip?) You can say it isn't the chipmakers' problem, but if it prevents me from needing their products, it is their problem.
After reading the article, I didn't see anything about a quad core CPU. Quad Father simply seems to be a dual cpu board with dual-core CPUs in it. That has been possible all along, no?
I will be thrilled if mankind can either (A) put a man on mars or (B) make a toaster that actually works right.
It was DARPA's idea. DARPA's annual budget is $3e9 (check out the 7th page), and the few million they spent on the Grand Challenges was IME some of the best money they have ever spent. Why make it harder to repeat success?
It might be better if Opera simply maintained an client-side blacklist of fradulent sites/domains, which was updated in the background while the browser is running. That way they wouldn't have to track your browsing at all. If these fraudlent sites are verified by hand by people at Opera, there could only number in the tens of thousands.
I think there must be more to quick-booting than simply booting from a flash drive. Otherwise, the gains would be limited, and would require no special support within Windows (or Linux). I am getting the impression that Microsoft must be working on Vista to decrease boot times by starting services after login, or initializing hardware devices in parallel, or something like that. Perhaps they are changing shutdown/bootup to be more like what we now call suspend to disk.
Another possible advantage - if the disk heads in a laptop can stay parked 90% of the time, it should dramatically reduce the odds of a broken/corrupt disk.
As a Linux laptop user (yes, there are a few of us) super-fast bootup would be a very attractive feature, and an advantage now falling to XP. I'm curious how the boot time will compare to a resume from "suspend to disk" (though the attractiveness of suspend to disk / suspend to ram are limited by the fact that they're often a nightmare to set up anyways).
If tech stocks are overvalued now, it's nothing like they were then. Now let's talk about housing, shall we?