Well, I think it's obvious that I qualify (see user name):-)
There's a nice quote from the article: "As Maxwell had predicted long ago, it does not need energy because it is powered by light." If light is not energy (or more exactly, does not carry energy), then I conclude that solar cells are violating the first law (because solar cells are powered by light and output energy).
However, for being an entropy-decreasing Maxwell's Demon it would suffice that there's no energy transfer from the light to the gas (or at least not enough to create that additional entropy through heating up), and in addition that there's no entropy transfer from the gas to the light (because if the light is simply carrying away entropy, it's no problem for the entropy of the gas to decrease; that's just a normal cooling process). It's especially the second part I strongly doubt: It would require the light not to be scattered from the molecules (and of course it also may not be absorbed, because that would violate the first condition). And I'm very doubtful about that.
Given these benchmarks, I doubt that speed is a major concern here, at least with current operating systems. I'm not sure about resource usage, though.
About the experience, this should IMHO be solvable by an appropriate library.
What was the time between the release of the 80286 and user software making use of the protected mode features? What was the time between the release of the 80386 and the time user software made use of 32 bit addressing? How many user programs already run in 64 bit mode right now?
Note that not everyone buys a new computer every one or two years. Especially since todays computers are generally powerful enough for most normal user's need. So when buying a computer today, it's probably a good idea to think about what sort of software will run on it in three or four years.
I see some major problems with multi-core processors for home users who only really use their computers for internet browsing, email, and standard productivity. They basically don't need it.
You mean, just like they don't need processors with several GHz? Or hard disks with several hundred GBytes?
Well, in my experience it's processes competing for disk access which slow the computer down (with swapping when memory gets full as special case). I can run computing-intensive processes in the background (niced, of course) without any apparent impact on the computer's responsiveness. However, as soon as something does lots of disk I/O (e.g. updatedb or beagle), the computer turns close to unusable.
Well, 16 core systems will improve the context switching performance: They'll use 3 cores for the 3 applications you use, and the other 13 for predicting what you'll do next and preloading the necessary pages etc.:-)
I wonder if Microsoft could potentially do the same thing. If they offered to give support/services for a brand of Linux, like Debian for example, and give low cost/high quality support for it and just swallow the loss like they swallow the loss for X-box, could this be used to kill Red Hat off in a few years?
Indeed, the bible reports a temporary rising of the sea level above any land. That proves that there was a huge global warming problem, back then. It also demonstrates the danger of such global warming: Except for one family, all humans died.
However, the bible nowhere mentions that there were no cars before the Flood. Granted, it also doesn't mention that there were cars. But if there were no cars, there surely shouldn't have been such a drastic global warming. So the Flood proves that there were cars before. The bible also reports that the Flood came due to the sins of the people. Therefore we can conclude that driving cars is a sin.
There was no indication on your "original" post that the text is not yours. That is, it's not just copying, but plagiarism. And you can very well be against copyright, and at the same time against plagiarism. Note that even the GPL does not allow you to distribute modified versions without proper attribution, even if you distribute the result under the GPL.
Thanks for the info. I already took a peek earlier, and even did some edits), although I didn't yet create an account. BTW, when I do, it will not be named "maxwell demon" - I tend to keep my identities somewhat separate (although I tend to use the same identity on several Wikis; I'll likely re-use my Wiki identity on Rosetta when I create an account).
Of course you can project down 4D objects to 3D in several ways, and thus get some feeling about them. But our perception always keeps those images at 3D, so in our brain it's just a 3D image with mentally attached info, unlike in the 3D->2D projected case, where or brain manages to re-create the 3d image without problems. You simply cannot visualize four straight lines staying perpendicular to each other, no matter how hard you try. You can visualize four lines in 3D-space, and can mentally attach the info "that line actually goes to 4th dimension, but was projected here", but that's it. Our mental images are restricted almost the same way the perceptions of real images are. E.g. another thing you just can't do is to visualize a body cell with all its structure in its natural size. You can visualize its structure enlarged (such as you see it in a microscope, or pictured in a book), and mentally attach "like this, but much smaller", or you can mentally shrink it, but then eventually you'll end up in your imagination with a structureless point.
Well, maybe the right solution is the same as with horses: Just like one changed the horses at relais stations, maybe one would simply change batteries at the filling station. Then it wouldn't matter too much how long they need to get refilled, only how long they need to be exchanged.
Interpreting statements such as "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" may prove difficult in the future however.
Archeologist, after having found that sentence: "Oh, they already knew about the technology of destroying mass! Up to now, it was assumed that technology was only found a century later! What a sensation!"
It also was an interesting political time. A lot of regimes were overturned, and the ex-dictators were so desperate that they asked random people to help them tranfer the money out of the country, and even were willing to pay huge sums for that.
Slashdot Mirror
And the first witness is an Anonymous Coward ...
But the good thing is that if you don't like the outcome, you just moderate it down until nobody sees it any more.
/bin/maxwelld: Entropy fault.
Process Therminated.
Well, I think it's obvious that I qualify (see user name) :-)
There's a nice quote from the article:
"As Maxwell had predicted long ago, it does not need energy because it is powered by light."
If light is not energy (or more exactly, does not carry energy), then I conclude that solar cells are violating the first law (because solar cells are powered by light and output energy).
However, for being an entropy-decreasing Maxwell's Demon it would suffice that there's no energy transfer from the light to the gas (or at least not enough to create that additional entropy through heating up), and in addition that there's no entropy transfer from the gas to the light (because if the light is simply carrying away entropy, it's no problem for the entropy of the gas to decrease; that's just a normal cooling process). It's especially the second part I strongly doubt: It would require the light not to be scattered from the molecules (and of course it also may not be absorbed, because that would violate the first condition). And I'm very doubtful about that.
Given these benchmarks, I doubt that speed is a major concern here, at least with current operating systems. I'm not sure about resource usage, though.
About the experience, this should IMHO be solvable by an appropriate library.
What was the time between the release of the 80286 and user software making use of the protected mode features? What was the time between the release of the 80386 and the time user software made use of 32 bit addressing? How many user programs already run in 64 bit mode right now?
Note that not everyone buys a new computer every one or two years. Especially since todays computers are generally powerful enough for most normal user's need. So when buying a computer today, it's probably a good idea to think about what sort of software will run on it in three or four years.
Well, in my experience it's processes competing for disk access which slow the computer down (with swapping when memory gets full as special case). I can run computing-intensive processes in the background (niced, of course) without any apparent impact on the computer's responsiveness. However, as soon as something does lots of disk I/O (e.g. updatedb or beagle), the computer turns close to unusable.
But in which way are threads which don't share anything different from several processes which communicate (e.g. through sockets or through pipes)?
Well, 16 core systems will improve the context switching performance: They'll use 3 cores for the 3 applications you use, and the other 13 for predicting what you'll do next and preloading the necessary pages etc. :-)
You surely mean 640K cores, right? :-)
Indeed, the bible reports a temporary rising of the sea level above any land. That proves that there was a huge global warming problem, back then. It also demonstrates the danger of such global warming: Except for one family, all humans died.
:-)
However, the bible nowhere mentions that there were no cars before the Flood. Granted, it also doesn't mention that there were cars. But if there were no cars, there surely shouldn't have been such a drastic global warming. So the Flood proves that there were cars before. The bible also reports that the Flood came due to the sins of the people. Therefore we can conclude that driving cars is a sin.
SCNR
Ramen worm? I guess it consisted of Spaghetti code! :-)
Indeed I've heared that some worms already remove competing worms if they find them. So yes, it should be possible.
There was no indication on your "original" post that the text is not yours. That is, it's not just copying, but plagiarism. And you can very well be against copyright, and at the same time against plagiarism. Note that even the GPL does not allow you to distribute modified versions without proper attribution, even if you distribute the result under the GPL.
Thanks for the info. I already took a peek earlier, and even did some edits), although I didn't yet create an account. BTW, when I do, it will not be named "maxwell demon" - I tend to keep my identities somewhat separate (although I tend to use the same identity on several Wikis; I'll likely re-use my Wiki identity on Rosetta when I create an account).
Of course you can project down 4D objects to 3D in several ways, and thus get some feeling about them. But our perception always keeps those images at 3D, so in our brain it's just a 3D image with mentally attached info, unlike in the 3D->2D projected case, where or brain manages to re-create the 3d image without problems. You simply cannot visualize four straight lines staying perpendicular to each other, no matter how hard you try. You can visualize four lines in 3D-space, and can mentally attach the info "that line actually goes to 4th dimension, but was projected here", but that's it. Our mental images are restricted almost the same way the perceptions of real images are. E.g. another thing you just can't do is to visualize a body cell with all its structure in its natural size. You can visualize its structure enlarged (such as you see it in a microscope, or pictured in a book), and mentally attach "like this, but much smaller", or you can mentally shrink it, but then eventually you'll end up in your imagination with a structureless point.
Well, maybe the right solution is the same as with horses: Just like one changed the horses at relais stations, maybe one would simply change batteries at the filling station. Then it wouldn't matter too much how long they need to get refilled, only how long they need to be exchanged.
Archeologist, after having found that sentence: "Oh, they already knew about the technology of destroying mass! Up to now, it was assumed that technology was only found a century later! What a sensation!"
Of course in reality, no one would understand the language after so much time.
It also was an interesting political time. A lot of regimes were overturned, and the ex-dictators were so desperate that they asked random people to help them tranfer the money out of the country, and even were willing to pay huge sums for that.
I don't know where you get your information from, but I'm quite sure that the expected remaining life time of the sun is several billion years.