Check out the dino. Now I ask you, doesn't that pattern look just like ones you've seen in hobby shops? Which means whoever made this thing has *pirated* a *physical object*! This baby is a copy machine for tangible objects - if they happen to be thin and flat.
Nothing in this world can be accomplished if you wait for unanimity. Nothing.
Why would the environmental control guy and health guy sign off? Why should they? Their job is to make sure things DON'T happen, think about that. Certainly they should be heard, but at the end of the day, all they want is to avoid disaster, and the safest thing is never to take off at all.
That said, the ISS should be deorbited because it's a useless money-pit.
The bigwigs in Pakistan are going to come down on these blackmailers, HARD. If anything, they will overreact. The word "terrorist" might even get thrown in somewhere. There's no way they'll be stupid enough to do nothing and let the outsourcing $$ go to China or Vietnam instead.
Let's say NASA came to the conclusion a UFO crashed there.
Some people would not believe it. Some would think the revelation was a conspiracy. Many others would just grip their bibles and squeeze their eyes shut.
Is it just me, or does it seem odd to anyone else that the same people who believe that NASA faked the moon landing also believe that NASA is covering up actual evidence of a UFO?
They do? Or are "they" just a muddled conglomeration of people you don't like?
Indeed, how can they label Bush as a known weasel, thus indicating his "war on terrorism" is at least in great part a sham, and still bash the french?
Duh, that's like asking how Rush Limbah and Al Sharpton can both be wrong at the same time.
The US and France both fought cynically to discredit each other and further their own interests in the world. Both lost, given that France's financial interests in Iraq are wiped out, but the world did not rally around the US, leaving us to go it alone and damaging our international stature while plunging us so deep into debt there's no real plan to resurface.
Sorry, building an intelligent, sentient machine requires alot more than pure computational capacity.
If you believe, like most scientists, that we humans evolved from random mutations and natural selection, then no, it really doesn't.
Random mutation and natural selection are just simple optimization principles. To use them to re-create sentience, you'd have to implement the evolutionary environment (the selection function) which resulted in sentience. It's not clear whether that would be any easier than just implementing sentience directly.
Here I was going to dispute the reference to Moore's law in the summary, and you've repeated it.
It isn't a problem of computational power. It's not like we know what to do, and are only waiting until the hardware catches up. Nobody knows how to program a really human-like (or animal-like) AI. For all we know, current computers may be capable, if only somebody knew how to write the software. The claims about the "solution" being just over the horizon are bogus, and driven by marketing concerns.
I sincerely hope than some more mainstream languages (besides Fortran) add support for this style of processing. Compiler optimization alone won't encourage programmers to implement things in a parallelizable way, it has be supported by language constructs. Otherwise the vector processing capabilities will continue be effectively limited to handcoded assembly - which is fine for pumping up synthetic benchmarks and a few very mainstream apps like Photoshop, but won't help most programs.
I'm afraid it is going to be an uphill battle to drag programmers away from the simple sequential model towards having a lot of explicit parallelism to use all these vector processors and multiple cores on a chip.
Succeeded in not being revolutionary?
on
Max Payne 2 Reviewed
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· Score: 3, Funny
I've just upgraded from a Dell L400 (similar computer, about 1" thick, 12" screen), largely because the RAM was maxxed out at 256 megs. Not enough. It was OK for many things, and I'll still use it for word processing on the go, but as you can imagine VMware really bogged down the whole system. 1024x768 is no impediment to multitasking, I find it very convenient to have many tabs open in mozilla with various documentation (and of course slashdot:) and that can really gobble RAM, just wait until you see "Java Applet Loading..." Then you're going to be editing documents with big images using Word or OpenOffice concurrently. You are not going to want to fire up the browser yet again just to look up a quick piece of info, might as well get enough RAM for everything. Mine had only 256, not 512, but you have to assume memory expectations rise over time.
Even if you're not running big apps, remember laptops have slow hard drives. Extra RAM is the best way to compensate.
Dell and IBM's newer 12" laptops (and probably lots of other brands) can hold 1 gig+ of ram, why not go with one of those instead?
The other thing I don't like about the 12" form factor - no expansion bay. That means the laptop is limited to a single battery, meaning you have to reboot to swap batteries. Some 12" laptops have a built-in CDROM, which is normally of no use to me and you can't re-use the space for more batteries.
Other than that it's a great size for a laptop, the smallest you can go with a basically normal keyboard and perfect for a 1024x768 display.
I recently went looking for a good online music website and hardly found anything. I haven't seen anybody offering what everybody obviously wants - a huge selection of music for low prices with immediate fulfillment.
No, I don't like the idea of integrating the music store with the music player, but I guess 1 choice is better than 0. Personally I'm not an ITunes customer because of DRM, but I don't expect Microsoft to offer anything more free... think about it, if MS did offer a music service, it just would HAVE to look exactly like iTunes - tied to other company products.
"Too bad itamium isnt a miserable failure, but the fastest CPU on the planet"
I think you'll find Cray Research taking issue with that , not to mention a number of military DSP producers. I think what you mean is "fastest
consumer/business mass production CPU"
To my thinking, CPU refers to a general purpose processor. I certainly don't thing DSP chips count as CPUs. Vector processors (Cray) are off in their own little category because they're only fast for SIMD instructions. They could probably rock the Photoshop plugin benchmarks, and that's about it, at least this side of FORTRAN. If we do broaden the rules far enough, I wonder how today's top video cards would stack up? Flops galore, for the specialized job that they do.
Who actually controls the internet? Who is the "ruling power"?
Whoever pays the bills.
Not so. Most of us are stuck leasing service indefinitely, and will own nothing even after we've repaid the cost of the infrastructure 10 times over. The $1000+ we each send to the cable company annually doesn't give us ownership or authority over diddly squat. Just like when we were all stuck paying $70/year, year after year, to AT&T for their $15 telephones.
Re:What about those of us
on
CNet on WinFS
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· Score: 1
I don't know in what universe any of this matters, as everyone's FAT is stored in the disk cache 90% of the time.
I did some benchmarking of ReiserFS against Ext2 for a school paper. Ext2 becomes unworkable at around 10,000 files or so (roughly, as it's a linear increase, not a threshold). At that size, the search time is considerable even without hitting disk. Certainly, if this were a major thorn in peoples' side, it would have been fixed long ago. But fixing it would reduce the need for databases in certain applications (say, the message cache for a usenet reader).
Re:What about those of us
on
CNet on WinFS
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· Score: 1
Nope. You'll have to search the FAT for the clusters in which the directory information is stored. This is similar to walking a single-linked list
...and ext2 is much the same. You can improve on this without introducing a whole different filesystem paradigm. See reiserFS, where directory contents are stored in balanced trees instead of a linear datastructure. It doesn't matter much until you get thousands of files into a single directory. People don't do that very often. But Reiser offers that would if our filesystems supported it better; instead, we complicate things by using a database or flat-file database on top of the filesystem when we have lots of little pieces of information to store.
To me, the reviewer doesn't seem to be justifying the pirate's crimes so much as making the point that the institutional injustices of the British Empire at the time were even worse. Call it "defense by charge of hypocrisy," like when we try to justify fileswapping by pointing out how the RIAA's member corporations steal from the public by fixing prices.
None of which makes the thought of being victimized by a real (historical) pirate any more appealing.
For the most common purposes that a desktop computer is used these days, a factor of 10 or 100 in CPU speed or many other performance measures doesn't matter. What I see most of the time are web browsers, email clients, word processors and presentation software running on machines that are rarely taxed by those tasks.
To a lot of people speed still does matter. These are the same people that were buying Sun workstations instead of PCs 10 years ago.
Sun's real problem is simple, their machines still cost more but they aren't faster anymore.
What the solution is, I just don't know. Has any company in Sun's position rebounded?
There are itanium clusters, they don't even begin to compete. That's the whole point. finally someone with a few bucks is realizing those macs have dirt cheap fast RISC processors that blow away x86 clones.
The Itanic is living proof that a NON x86 CPU can still be crap:)
Yes, almost empty AND frequent stops. The bus will stop in the road and sit there even if nobody is getting on or off, in order to stay on schedule.
I don't know what you mean by "suck it," but I'm happy riding my motorcycle wherever I want to go. I get from A to B quickly, about 40 mpg in city driving, and great parking spots.
As for public transit maybe those little individual shuttles on tracks could work. On the other hand, since they don't force a large number of people to go from the same starting point to the same destination at the same time, maybe they won't reduce congestion much.
Fair enough. It seems to me that bluethooth's value would be much greater if e.g. the Mac bluetooth peripherals would interoperate with a bluethooth-enabled PC (or PC peripherals on the MAC). I don't know, maybe they already can? Two bluetooth devices should be able to work together whenever it's sensible. The "bluetooth" designation is worthless if it doesn't imply interoperability.
Slashdot Mirror
Real men download their OSs.
"Why should we waste money paying the police and courts to restrict the distribution of these works long after their creators are dead and gone?"
Check out the dino. Now I ask you, doesn't that pattern look just like ones you've seen in hobby shops? Which means whoever made this thing has *pirated* a *physical object*! This baby is a copy machine for tangible objects - if they happen to be thin and flat.
Why would the environmental control guy and health guy sign off? Why should they? Their job is to make sure things DON'T happen, think about that. Certainly they should be heard, but at the end of the day, all they want is to avoid disaster, and the safest thing is never to take off at all.
That said, the ISS should be deorbited because it's a useless money-pit.
The bigwigs in Pakistan are going to come down on these blackmailers, HARD. If anything, they will overreact. The word "terrorist" might even get thrown in somewhere. There's no way they'll be stupid enough to do nothing and let the outsourcing $$ go to China or Vietnam instead.
I misspoke in using the word "salary," but his total pay is nothing to sneeze at! And a $90e6 personal jet ain't a bad perk either.
The US and France both fought cynically to discredit each other and further their own interests in the world. Both lost, given that France's financial interests in Iraq are wiped out, but the world did not rally around the US, leaving us to go it alone and damaging our international stature while plunging us so deep into debt there's no real plan to resurface.
It isn't a problem of computational power. It's not like we know what to do, and are only waiting until the hardware catches up. Nobody knows how to program a really human-like (or animal-like) AI. For all we know, current computers may be capable, if only somebody knew how to write the software. The claims about the "solution" being just over the horizon are bogus, and driven by marketing concerns.
I'm afraid it is going to be an uphill battle to drag programmers away from the simple sequential model towards having a lot of explicit parallelism to use all these vector processors and multiple cores on a chip.
Wow!
Even if you're not running big apps, remember laptops have slow hard drives. Extra RAM is the best way to compensate.
Dell and IBM's newer 12" laptops (and probably lots of other brands) can hold 1 gig+ of ram, why not go with one of those instead?
The other thing I don't like about the 12" form factor - no expansion bay. That means the laptop is limited to a single battery, meaning you have to reboot to swap batteries. Some 12" laptops have a built-in CDROM, which is normally of no use to me and you can't re-use the space for more batteries.
Other than that it's a great size for a laptop, the smallest you can go with a basically normal keyboard and perfect for a 1024x768 display.
No, I don't like the idea of integrating the music store with the music player, but I guess 1 choice is better than 0. Personally I'm not an ITunes customer because of DRM, but I don't expect Microsoft to offer anything more free... think about it, if MS did offer a music service, it just would HAVE to look exactly like iTunes - tied to other company products.
I count 0.
None of which makes the thought of being victimized by a real (historical) pirate any more appealing.
Sun's real problem is simple, their machines still cost more but they aren't faster anymore.
What the solution is, I just don't know. Has any company in Sun's position rebounded?
I don't know what you mean by "suck it," but I'm happy riding my motorcycle wherever I want to go. I get from A to B quickly, about 40 mpg in city driving, and great parking spots.
As for public transit maybe those little individual shuttles on tracks could work. On the other hand, since they don't force a large number of people to go from the same starting point to the same destination at the same time, maybe they won't reduce congestion much.
Fair enough. It seems to me that bluethooth's value would be much greater if e.g. the Mac bluetooth peripherals would interoperate with a bluethooth-enabled PC (or PC peripherals on the MAC). I don't know, maybe they already can? Two bluetooth devices should be able to work together whenever it's sensible. The "bluetooth" designation is worthless if it doesn't imply interoperability.