One thing I can imagine this being used for is neurobiology. If you want to study the brain's response to some stimuli, it's easier if there isn't a lot of interference from other stimuli. But that wasn't mentioned in the article, so I guess you're right.
Having a vision for our space exploration makes a lot of sense to me. So much so that I wonder if NASA already had something like this, which a lot of us just didn't know about.
I know many of us tend to be skeptical about mission statements. However, it seems like a good idea because unlike a business (universal business mission statement: "Make Lots Of Money"), it isn't that obvious what NASA is trying to do, or should try to do. And I think it should be more specific than "explore space, and earth from space."
That is becoming much less of a problem. People like to point out that there are only two drives left in the world that can read the 1960 census. Interesting, but how many were ever manufactured in the first place? 50? A couple hundred?
Compare that to CD readers. Millions have been made, and now they're so entrenched that the next generation device (DVD) can still read them. Widespread technologies don't fade away fast. I wonder when the last record player will be made?
The goal isn't to average 150 fps, it's to keep going at 30 or so even when the action is intense. Nothing like jumping into one of those big hectic battles, or going in for a strafing run on the outskirts of a sizeable city, only to see your game become a slideshow.
The argument over whether graphics cards are "too fast" is a silly one. Next time you're descending over a city in a real plane, look out the window and think for a moment what would be required to simulate that - current games aren't even close.
Besides, current game environments are horribly static; only a few things work, everything else is indestructible. When I hit something with a rocket, there should be damage and rubble piling up underneath. Making everything dynamic will use incredible computing power. Kudos to HL2 for taking the next step.
(And no, I don't buy the latest and greatest cards. But setting back the bleeding edge would only set back the midrange by the same amount).
Sad thing is, Hiroshima was devastated by a puny little fission bomb. Teller was behind the much more devastating fusion bomb, which uses a fission bomb just for a fuse. The difference between the largest fusion bombs and the first fission bombs is about the same as the difference between the latter and a plain old TNT bomb.
Agreed completely! Gas tax is already such an elegant solution to the problem, because the energy from the gas is what wrecks the roads in the first place. Of all the taxes out there, the gas tax seems the most fair!
I'd argue it isn't a republic unless the decision-makers are elected by the governed, and most shares aren't owned by employees.
What sort of govt. does Iraq have right now? It's run by the US, and the US is a republic, so is Iraq a republic? No, because the Iraqis have no vote (since the previous sham election of Hussein).
Could you explain that one some more? I would think a corporation does the bidding of whoever owns it, which isn't necessarily the people who work there.
One thing you do get is peace of mind in an environment where time == money. It is very likely that Sun-branded card was integration tested with their machines and Solaris, so the odds are very very good that it will serve you well. Contrast this with the PC world, where the odds are simply good. The difference is not trivial, IMO.
Dell does that too. Of course the expense is amortized across a lot more customers.
Maybe there's a reason people seem to sympathize with one party and not the other. Maybe it's because the lawsuit is stupid.
Why don't you see if you can craft a story similarly slanted *against* the 12-year old, which convincingly makes her out as a menace to society and persuasively argues that she should be liable for millions of dollars in damages. (And it doesn't count if your version is funny).
You can argue J2EE isn't favored on Linux, but in practice it's all there is. (Which is fine since it works).
Yes, there are some projects called Mono and DotGNU, but that doesn't mean they're viable. A.Net developer is somebody who knows the hundreds of classes available, and who "programs" by plugging together those components. Mono and dotGNU are just the infrastructure (and not even that, yet); there's no content.
Trying to reverse engineer implementations of all those classes is hopeless, like Wine. Particular targeted appliations will work, with caveats, but the chances of running some application off the shelf without problems will be close to 0.
That's a very nice paper, but I have been using an ssh tunnel on this laptop's wireless access for about 2 years, and I have to tell you, it works quite well. I can even stream video, so long as it's encoded at a bitrate that consumes about 1GB/hr or less. Optimal? I don't know. Useful? You bet.
As for the paper, it seems mainly concerned with packet loss and retransmission. The fact is that although we're glad TCP/IP can handle reordering and retransmission, it usually doesn't have to. Not even on wireless, since 802.11 does its own retransmissions without bothering TCP/IP. And as for the possibility of different packets taking different routes and arriving out of order, its true... in theory.
Shucks, I was getting it from the original site at a good rate (~30KB/s) and they just erased the file (disconnected, then 404 on retry). Which I think means we made some poor geek's pager go off on a Sunday evening.
Personally, I am very skeptical that the perfect power source can ever be discovered.
We already have plain old fission nuclear power, and the only think really wrong with it is that it works TOO well. Any relatively small package capable of releasing tremendous energy will be usable as a weapon, and that is exactly what's keeping nuclear power down.
I realize there are environmental concerns too, but I think fear over the devastating potential of nuclear weapons is the root problem. Without that, pollution can be managed and contained.
Airplanes make plenty of noise even without the boom, so silience it isn't necessary. If it's enough to make supersonic flight over populated areas acceptable to people, the mission is accomplished. Noise is what really prevents supersonic passenger planes.
The favorite game of too many (irresponsible) parents is Passing the Buck. Thanks for not being one of the wastes of flesh who blame entertainment sources for their failed children.
I just read the linked articles, and I didn't see any reference to the criminals' parents blaming the game. Just the victims.
The benefits from the memory subsystem will be offset by the fact that objects containing pointers will be twice as big as on IA32. That means objects could have twice the cache footprint and twice the memory bandwith requirements.
I wonder if it will be possible to use 32 bit pointers within the X86-64 isa?
This would save memory on pointers but give you access to the extra registers, instructions, and one-whack 64 bit math (which should be great for encryption and compression, without using special mmx instructions).
I thought I remembered SPARC being able to do this, but it looks like SPARC programs must be compiled with 64 bit pointers to efficiently perform 64 bit arithmetic.
Re:64bit performance gains...
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1) more registers. This will get us fair performance increase from the start, as compilers will have more registers to work with when doing calculations on multiple pieces of data.
I think processors already have alot more than the addressable number of registers, which are used by dynamically remapping the addresses during execution. Sounds ugly, and doing it in the compiler will surely work somewhat better, but it decreases the performance increase we can expect.
I don't know, lots of mp3 players already data storage capacity, and I don't see why it should complicate anything. Think of a usb memory key, it doesn't even *have* a UI, you just plug it into the USB and whammo, storage. Personally I'd rather load mp3s onto the player simply by seeing it as a filesystem.
Wireless seems like a natural progression from having to carry a wire around, except I wonder if wireless could ever be fast enough.
This IS the market deciding. It's deciding there's no reason to pay hundreds for each and every copy of commonly available software (like word processors) anymore. As for govt. funding, well guess who MS's #1 customer is... the US military now add to that all the money they get from federal and local govt at all levels and your tax dollars are by MS's biggest source of income.
The $40e9 MS has in the bank, and all the cash they lose in their unprofitable divisions (which is almost all of them except Office and Windows) is all waste from the market's perspective. A truly free and fair open market does not tolerate 85% profit margins for long.
Sure, what MS does makes sense from the perspective of MS. So what? "Your honor, my defense for robbing the bank is that I thought it was the easiest way to get rich." Murdering BeOS and Netscape (and a host of others) certainly was in the best interest of MS, but it wasn't legal, nor was it consistent with a company that pays lip service to competing on innovation.
Sure, it would be naiive of us not to expect them to say whatever benefits them, but it would be outright stupid to take their words at face value.
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One thing I can imagine this being used for is neurobiology. If you want to study the brain's response to some stimuli, it's easier if there isn't a lot of interference from other stimuli. But that wasn't mentioned in the article, so I guess you're right.
I know many of us tend to be skeptical about mission statements. However, it seems like a good idea because unlike a business (universal business mission statement: "Make Lots Of Money"), it isn't that obvious what NASA is trying to do, or should try to do. And I think it should be more specific than "explore space, and earth from space."
Compare that to CD readers. Millions have been made, and now they're so entrenched that the next generation device (DVD) can still read them. Widespread technologies don't fade away fast. I wonder when the last record player will be made?
The argument over whether graphics cards are "too fast" is a silly one. Next time you're descending over a city in a real plane, look out the window and think for a moment what would be required to simulate that - current games aren't even close.
Besides, current game environments are horribly static; only a few things work, everything else is indestructible. When I hit something with a rocket, there should be damage and rubble piling up underneath. Making everything dynamic will use incredible computing power. Kudos to HL2 for taking the next step.
(And no, I don't buy the latest and greatest cards. But setting back the bleeding edge would only set back the midrange by the same amount).
Sad thing is, Hiroshima was devastated by a puny little fission bomb. Teller was behind the much more devastating fusion bomb, which uses a fission bomb just for a fuse. The difference between the largest fusion bombs and the first fission bombs is about the same as the difference between the latter and a plain old TNT bomb.
Agreed completely! Gas tax is already such an elegant solution to the problem, because the energy from the gas is what wrecks the roads in the first place. Of all the taxes out there, the gas tax seems the most fair!
What sort of govt. does Iraq have right now? It's run by the US, and the US is a republic, so is Iraq a republic? No, because the Iraqis have no vote (since the previous sham election of Hussein).
Why don't you see if you can craft a story similarly slanted *against* the 12-year old, which convincingly makes her out as a menace to society and persuasively argues that she should be liable for millions of dollars in damages. (And it doesn't count if your version is funny).
Yes, there are some projects called Mono and DotGNU, but that doesn't mean they're viable. A .Net developer is somebody who knows the hundreds of classes available, and who "programs" by plugging together those components. Mono and dotGNU are just the infrastructure (and not even that, yet); there's no content.
Trying to reverse engineer implementations of all those classes is hopeless, like Wine. Particular targeted appliations will work, with caveats, but the chances of running some application off the shelf without problems will be close to 0.
No, companies are entirely different, because they are dictatorships.
As for the paper, it seems mainly concerned with packet loss and retransmission. The fact is that although we're glad TCP/IP can handle reordering and retransmission, it usually doesn't have to. Not even on wireless, since 802.11 does its own retransmissions without bothering TCP/IP. And as for the possibility of different packets taking different routes and arriving out of order, its true... in theory.
Shucks, I was getting it from the original site at a good rate (~30KB/s) and they just erased the file (disconnected, then 404 on retry). Which I think means we made some poor geek's pager go off on a Sunday evening.
We already have plain old fission nuclear power, and the only think really wrong with it is that it works TOO well. Any relatively small package capable of releasing tremendous energy will be usable as a weapon, and that is exactly what's keeping nuclear power down.
I realize there are environmental concerns too, but I think fear over the devastating potential of nuclear weapons is the root problem. Without that, pollution can be managed and contained.
Airplanes make plenty of noise even without the boom, so silience it isn't necessary. If it's enough to make supersonic flight over populated areas acceptable to people, the mission is accomplished. Noise is what really prevents supersonic passenger planes.
Fair enough but swapping in a new USB peripheral is alot different than opening the box. In particular, a techie visit is not required.
I thought I remembered SPARC being able to do this, but it looks like SPARC programs must be compiled with 64 bit pointers to efficiently perform 64 bit arithmetic.
Wireless seems like a natural progression from having to carry a wire around, except I wonder if wireless could ever be fast enough.
The $40e9 MS has in the bank, and all the cash they lose in their unprofitable divisions (which is almost all of them except Office and Windows) is all waste from the market's perspective. A truly free and fair open market does not tolerate 85% profit margins for long.
Sure, what MS does makes sense from the perspective of MS. So what? "Your honor, my defense for robbing the bank is that I thought it was the easiest way to get rich." Murdering BeOS and Netscape (and a host of others) certainly was in the best interest of MS, but it wasn't legal, nor was it consistent with a company that pays lip service to competing on innovation. Sure, it would be naiive of us not to expect them to say whatever benefits them, but it would be outright stupid to take their words at face value.
Microsoft OEM contracts forbid a visible dual-boot option.