Is that what all this fuss is about? A lousy analog resampling? That's the next worst thing to putting a microphone by a speaker. Good luck stopping it.
it's a better thing when the memory is shared (single cache) rather than separate (dual cache).
Yeah, if the dual cache could be shared and still run without added latency or decreased bandwidth. That doesn't mean a different chip with a unified cache would be faster though.
Also, the same is true of dual cores in the first place. It would be better to have a single processor (without dual cores) if it could be twice as fast. Unfortunately, chip designers seem to be running out of ways to usefully employ all the transistors Moore's law is giving them. Now they're resorting to designs that employ parallelism, which is relatively easy to do, but harder to exploit in software, and sometimes hardly useful at all.
A false alarm? Have you no appreciation for the dedicated security professionals who exposed and headed off the conspiracy? The complete lack of destruction only testifies to our brilliance and validates our security plan, bow down before us!!!
Why do I always hear this back yard argument? If you took an average size suburban house and made it water tight, all of the nuclear waste made by all of mans reactors since the beginning of the nuclear age wouldn't even fill the basement.
That is not true. You can't count just the spent fuel itself; "nuclear waste" is mostly stuff like contaminated water, dirt, and equipment. The Hanford site alone has "more than 50 million gallons of nuclear waste material," and unfortunately it's not all contained.
I did a comparo of ReiserFS and Ext3 a while back and these were my main findings:
1) Reiser destroyed Ext3 for directories with many thousands of files in them. However, now you say ext3 has btree hash dirs, probably minimizing the difference
2) Resier was much more space efficient if the average file sizes on the filesystem is very small (say, well under 4k). However, no *real* filesystems I found were like this.
3) The two were about the same in speed for large numbers of small reads and writes.
4) Ext3 was a bit faster for big sustained reads/writes. But it wasn't a huge difference and might not apply to Reiser4.
In short, Reiser4 was more robust to unusual filesystem usage, at a slight penalty to normal usage.
In fairness, this is because Ext has been around for so long, it is optimized for normal usage, and software is tailored not to step on the toes of Ext's deficiencies. For instance, to store huge numbers of small files, people usually use a database of some sort (even if only flat file). Reiser opens the possibility of simplifying life by replacing simple databases of small records with the filesystem; for instance, it might be practical for a Usenet newsreader to store every cached message in a separate file.
But for the most part, I think Reiser will stand on its new gee-whiz features (plugins), rather than raw performance, since there are so many filesystems with roughly comparable performance for normal usage scenarios. As with Longhorn's fancy new filesystem, the question is whether people really want feature-rich files.
Osama didn't want to destroy American Life. His sole intention was:
1. So that American Troops will get out from Saudi Arabia, since for him, it is a sacred land.
2. Stop backing off Israel in term of every military movement they do against Palestine people.
You covered Saudi Arabia, but forgot to tell us how to appease Bin Laden without allowing him to drive the Jews into the sea. In fact we are so far from allowing that to happen that for the most part we don't even recognize it as an issue.
Ain't gonna happen.
do not screw over people in foreign lands for fun and profit and you will tend not to make enemies.
Well, what do you propose to do with Israel? That's the main thing they hate us for. Even if creating Israel back in the 40s was a clear-cut case of interventionism, what do you propose to do about it now?
I would design the system soundly, and make it flexible underneath, but not push that as the main feature, or give people cause to reimplement right off the bat.
Here's what happened with X11 as I see it. Fundamentally, it was a network protocol spec and client/server model. Then they built Xlib to implement the network protocol. Then, they ginned up the Athena widget set, sort of a quickie prototype on how one might actually start to build a UI on X. Having done that, they called it a day, leaving it for others to implement the look and feel, and basic functionality like cut & paste. As a result, for years most developers just used the (crappy) Athena widgets as-is, while some others started off in several directions making something worth using (e.g. Motif). Finally a decade or two later we have some decent Windowing toolkits built on X, and a look-and-feel morass.
X was overly focused on the juicy technical aspects of the day (like networking) and stopped short of providing an application-ready windowing system.
Instead, focus on delivering 1) a rock-solid, high quality API and 2) a great-looking, high performance implementation for the common case - an app running locally on a PC.
In other words, pick good API (e.g. GTK) and implement it over a small, relatively primitive rendering library to access hardware (e.g. OpenGL).
If people want to come along later and re-implement the API to insert a network transport layer, fine. They can write a shared object to do that, and slip it in place of the local version. Its backend might be VNC, X, whatever.
If they want to re-implement it to look different, or have different functionality, fine. But there probably won't be a lot of motivation to do this (except maybe to default to a different skin, or make this year's buttons round instead of square, so people feel better about paying for an OS upgrade). And if you replace the default shared GUI library with something else, *all* apps will link against it and hence look the same. (Unless you want to get fancy for some reason and run them with different link paths or something).
I happen to have a T40 *without* the internal (mini-pci) WIFI adapter, but my D-Link 802.11b and Netgear 802.11G fit side-by side in the PCMCIA slots just fine.
I don't think a windowing system should be built around networking at all.
In the common case, there is no client or server, just an app running on a PC. So don't build the assumption of networking into windowing.
Look at X: it's built on a standardized network protocol. If you want you could implement a different Xlib, even one with a different API, so long as it used the X network protocol. But that extra degree of design freedom has been a complete waste of effort, code complexity, and CPU cycles. Instead of writing code to generate X protocol network messages, everybody uses XLib. In other words, people ignored the network protocol, and standardized on the Xlib API.
So let's centralize around an API, and write different implementations of that API that speak X over a network, or VNC, or whatever - but the first and most important implementation will simply and efficiently draw on the local screen!
I'm afraid I disagree with the idea of a minimalist windowing system - one that leaves most everything to user level libraries. This still leaves the door wide open for applications to implement various looks, various copy/paste mechanisms, and other things that annoy people.
20 years ago it might have made sense to make this very modular since nobody knew how things would end up looking. Today, let's face it, windowing is "done." All the various libraries over X look and work very similarly, just different enough to clash. Windowing is mature, I say it's time for more integration.
Modularity should be at the level of source code, not runtime components.
I guess I'll chime in, since I have a WiFi-enabled palm device (Sony TH55) and a 12" laptop and I don't think you do.
A laptop is not a PDA. I take my PDA everywhere and reference it many times per day. In fact I rarely leave home without it, since I always end up regretting it when I do. I'm not taking a laptop to the hardware store just in case I have to jot something down.
As to your second point, I have to agree that the WiFi, camera, sound recorder, and mp3 playback are only of secondary interest compared to the to-do list, calendaring, and memo apps.
That said, half-VGA (320x480) is somewhat usable for web browsing. In fact when I browse slashdot on it, I don't use the special palm-formatted version because it's too sparse. This may be the ultimate toilet-entertainment device, not that I would ever do such a thing.
But besides that, WiFi is good for quickly, wirelessly transferring documents and software to the Palm, and the battery-life hit is surprisingly not that bad. I can open palmgear download a zip file, and install apps without using a PC at all. Bluetooth is comparable, except it doesn't work from anywhere in my home.
I'm torn on having WiFi in the SD slot rather than built-in, as it is on the Sony. On the one hand, I only use the WiFi now and then, so why carry it all the time? On the other hand, it doesn't seem to add much bulk, and I'm already using the SD slot for memory expansion, so having to take that out would render the Palm only partually functional.
A: You've got to have some huge force outside of the United States, where it's getting locked down. What if China says, "The FCC doesn't rule us. We're going to stop assigning frequencies within our borders. We're going to regulate devices so that they play fair with each other, and we're going to open up spectrum." That's going to make the U.S. an economic and technological backwater.
I think the guy is wrong, unless/until the Powers that Be actually manage to DRM all computers. Until then, possibilities remain. There are still bands exploring free music distrubtion for publicity. Brittanica hasn't managed to suppress Wikipedia. SCO isn't selling very many $699 licenses for Linux.
Whoops, you forgot the biggest murderer of all, Stalin. And in my opinion he was also the most evil, because he reigned not by persuasion but by terror and deception. Even his followers either hated him or had no idea what he was up to. He was no religious zealot.
These first four Mongol Khans never preferred one religion over another. They allowed freedom of religion in the lands they conquered. Also, because they never believed in the superiority of any religion, they were not picky over those they massacared. They slaughtered 30 million Chinese, another couple million Russians and Europeans, and another couple million Muslims.
But a laptop can be an access point too. In fact my home "access point" is none other than a pc with a dlink card and hostap driver. Works great!
Now I'm not supposing most people would want to set up linux with the hostap driver, and configure their routing, etc. But with some slick Windows-based software, you could do the same thing in a more user-friendly way. Hey, they could even charge double the normal price for the pcmcia WIFI card, and call it a "special access point" card or something.
AI still is in the suckitude phase; even the best ones aren't much smarter than a cockroach.
Cockroaches are far beyond anything people have devised in many ways. They can heal, reproduce, find their own food (which can be almost anything), and negotiate injury.
In fact, a synthetic cockroach would come fairly close to realizing grey goo, given that cockroaches are far more numerous and pervasive than people on this planet.
All of which is to say, I agree, but it's not just AI. Mankind's creations are still very crude compared to nature.
This is actually a common thing during Olympics. Participating athletes are usually of very high level, and competitions are often very very close. It often boils down to who makes the least mistakes.
This is why the X-Games are/were in some ways more fun. Most of the sports are fads. Granted, that trivializes it on one hand, but it also means every year there are new tricks, and a real chance for breakthroughs. You might even argue it favors more generalist athletes, who can pick up a new sport more quickly.
The Olympics on the other hand is about pristine perfection. Everybody competing has already done it 10,000 times or more, the question is whether or not they nail it in one try.
In a similar exercise, a pair of business professors have predicteding the final Olympic medal count using socio-economic data rather than athletic performance.
Some people think national pride doesn't belong at the Olympics, and decry such things as counting medals by nationality.
These studies are the strongest possible argument in favor of nationalism at the games. This is why all the folks back home feel some pride in the achievements of an athlete they never met - because there apparently is a strong collective aspect to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that what all this fuss is about? A lousy analog resampling? That's the next worst thing to putting a microphone by a speaker. Good luck stopping it.
Also, the same is true of dual cores in the first place. It would be better to have a single processor (without dual cores) if it could be twice as fast. Unfortunately, chip designers seem to be running out of ways to usefully employ all the transistors Moore's law is giving them. Now they're resorting to designs that employ parallelism, which is relatively easy to do, but harder to exploit in software, and sometimes hardly useful at all.
A false alarm? Have you no appreciation for the dedicated security professionals who exposed and headed off the conspiracy? The complete lack of destruction only testifies to our brilliance and validates our security plan, bow down before us!!!
If so, it would be fantastic - finally *something* with capacity on the order of magnetic disks.
If not, I guess it's just a little better way to watch movies - once we all invest in new 16 megapixel TV sets.
Well, that's simply the definition of "perfect hash," so yeah. But those are useless for verifying files.
1) Reiser destroyed Ext3 for directories with many thousands of files in them. However, now you say ext3 has btree hash dirs, probably minimizing the difference
2) Resier was much more space efficient if the average file sizes on the filesystem is very small (say, well under 4k). However, no *real* filesystems I found were like this.
3) The two were about the same in speed for large numbers of small reads and writes.
4) Ext3 was a bit faster for big sustained reads/writes. But it wasn't a huge difference and might not apply to Reiser4.
In short, Reiser4 was more robust to unusual filesystem usage, at a slight penalty to normal usage.
In fairness, this is because Ext has been around for so long, it is optimized for normal usage, and software is tailored not to step on the toes of Ext's deficiencies. For instance, to store huge numbers of small files, people usually use a database of some sort (even if only flat file). Reiser opens the possibility of simplifying life by replacing simple databases of small records with the filesystem; for instance, it might be practical for a Usenet newsreader to store every cached message in a separate file.
But for the most part, I think Reiser will stand on its new gee-whiz features (plugins), rather than raw performance, since there are so many filesystems with roughly comparable performance for normal usage scenarios. As with Longhorn's fancy new filesystem, the question is whether people really want feature-rich files.
Legacy admissions baby! Got Bush into Yale. (But to his credit he's renounced them).
Here's what happened with X11 as I see it. Fundamentally, it was a network protocol spec and client/server model. Then they built Xlib to implement the network protocol. Then, they ginned up the Athena widget set, sort of a quickie prototype on how one might actually start to build a UI on X. Having done that, they called it a day, leaving it for others to implement the look and feel, and basic functionality like cut & paste. As a result, for years most developers just used the (crappy) Athena widgets as-is, while some others started off in several directions making something worth using (e.g. Motif). Finally a decade or two later we have some decent Windowing toolkits built on X, and a look-and-feel morass.
X was overly focused on the juicy technical aspects of the day (like networking) and stopped short of providing an application-ready windowing system.
Instead, focus on delivering 1) a rock-solid, high quality API and 2) a great-looking, high performance implementation for the common case - an app running locally on a PC.
In other words, pick good API (e.g. GTK) and implement it over a small, relatively primitive rendering library to access hardware (e.g. OpenGL).
If people want to come along later and re-implement the API to insert a network transport layer, fine. They can write a shared object to do that, and slip it in place of the local version. Its backend might be VNC, X, whatever.
If they want to re-implement it to look different, or have different functionality, fine. But there probably won't be a lot of motivation to do this (except maybe to default to a different skin, or make this year's buttons round instead of square, so people feel better about paying for an OS upgrade). And if you replace the default shared GUI library with something else, *all* apps will link against it and hence look the same. (Unless you want to get fancy for some reason and run them with different link paths or something).
I happen to have a T40 *without* the internal (mini-pci) WIFI adapter, but my D-Link 802.11b and Netgear 802.11G fit side-by side in the PCMCIA slots just fine.
In the common case, there is no client or server, just an app running on a PC. So don't build the assumption of networking into windowing.
Look at X: it's built on a standardized network protocol. If you want you could implement a different Xlib, even one with a different API, so long as it used the X network protocol. But that extra degree of design freedom has been a complete waste of effort, code complexity, and CPU cycles. Instead of writing code to generate X protocol network messages, everybody uses XLib. In other words, people ignored the network protocol, and standardized on the Xlib API.
So let's centralize around an API, and write different implementations of that API that speak X over a network, or VNC, or whatever - but the first and most important implementation will simply and efficiently draw on the local screen!
20 years ago it might have made sense to make this very modular since nobody knew how things would end up looking. Today, let's face it, windowing is "done." All the various libraries over X look and work very similarly, just different enough to clash. Windowing is mature, I say it's time for more integration.
Modularity should be at the level of source code, not runtime components.
Now posting from the TH55 in "light" mode, and its very nice! Thanks for the tip!
A laptop is not a PDA. I take my PDA everywhere and reference it many times per day. In fact I rarely leave home without it, since I always end up regretting it when I do. I'm not taking a laptop to the hardware store just in case I have to jot something down.
As to your second point, I have to agree that the WiFi, camera, sound recorder, and mp3 playback are only of secondary interest compared to the to-do list, calendaring, and memo apps.
That said, half-VGA (320x480) is somewhat usable for web browsing. In fact when I browse slashdot on it, I don't use the special palm-formatted version because it's too sparse. This may be the ultimate toilet-entertainment device, not that I would ever do such a thing.
But besides that, WiFi is good for quickly, wirelessly transferring documents and software to the Palm, and the battery-life hit is surprisingly not that bad. I can open palmgear download a zip file, and install apps without using a PC at all. Bluetooth is comparable, except it doesn't work from anywhere in my home.
I'm torn on having WiFi in the SD slot rather than built-in, as it is on the Sony. On the one hand, I only use the WiFi now and then, so why carry it all the time? On the other hand, it doesn't seem to add much bulk, and I'm already using the SD slot for memory expansion, so having to take that out would render the Palm only partually functional.
I thought this paragraph was interesting:
I think the guy is wrong, unless/until the Powers that Be actually manage to DRM all computers. Until then, possibilities remain. There are still bands exploring free music distrubtion for publicity. Brittanica hasn't managed to suppress Wikipedia. SCO isn't selling very many $699 licenses for Linux.And Ghengis Khan:
Now I'm not supposing most people would want to set up linux with the hostap driver, and configure their routing, etc. But with some slick Windows-based software, you could do the same thing in a more user-friendly way. Hey, they could even charge double the normal price for the pcmcia WIFI card, and call it a "special access point" card or something.
In fact, a synthetic cockroach would come fairly close to realizing grey goo, given that cockroaches are far more numerous and pervasive than people on this planet.
All of which is to say, I agree, but it's not just AI. Mankind's creations are still very crude compared to nature.
The Olympics on the other hand is about pristine perfection. Everybody competing has already done it 10,000 times or more, the question is whether or not they nail it in one try.
These studies are the strongest possible argument in favor of nationalism at the games. This is why all the folks back home feel some pride in the achievements of an athlete they never met - because there apparently is a strong collective aspect to it.