This is similar to what I thought when I read the tag at the top. How can it be daunting? Surely if he wants to become a geek then the *key* part is the challenge, if there were no challenge then it wouldn't be geeking. Geeks thrive on doing the hard stuff because they can. Maybe he's just a wannabe poser...
As for something to get started on, well, like the parent says the API's are complicated just big. Pick something that you want to do, and do it. Yes it'll be a bit hard to get started but that is the point, and if you really do want the challenge then you'll enjoy it
No, the substitution of drinking does not make the argument as valid as the original. Prohibition has been tried and it failed, that's why I thought that I'd use that argument. I agree with you that that it is a balancing act between the common good and individual rights, but I don't think that what you are vouching for is a balance; its just restriction.
I agree with the poster that you were replying to that there is nothing inherently about drinking or gambling, people see them as such because of their religious backgrounds. As a society the restrictions that we make should be on the things that we all agree are wrong. When somebody drinks to excess, or takes drugs to excess and then has behaviour that is outside the bounds of what society deems acceptable - then they should be punished for that. Trying to solve it by restricting everybodies ability to drink, or take drugs is counterproductive because everyone can see that it is only to stop a small minority and assumes that they fall within the majority.
Gambling is the same sort of behaviour. There is nothing inherently wrong with gambling, the only problem is that a small minority of people cannot gamble sensibly, restricting the rights of the majority to try and target that minority will not work, and furthermore is an unfair restriction on most people.
Perhaps not. If their tax structure is sufficently different then they'll still get the business. Most of the UK betting sites are based off-shore for tax reasons.
I'm not religious and I don't see that more drinking is a good thing. It may be an individual choice to drink, but if 100% of people chose to drink heavily we would have massive social disruption. As it is every idiot who blows their nest egg due to a drinking habit is another idiot that you and I get to finance the retirement of via Social Security and Medicare (aka welfare for old folks).
As well as drinking you could try this with drug-taking, or how about breeding even? Your argument is clearly flawed as you're arguing that people should have their freedoms restricted so that you don't have to face the possibility that you'll have support the common good that you speak of.
If we follow your line of argument to its logical conclusion then maybe we should just start telling people what they can do to make it easier for them and assume everything else ist verboten?
I think that this is a process that turns full circle after you've been doing it for long enough. (I'm mentally slapping myself at this point for thinking of myself of an 'old man' of programming at the age of 25!) When you start doing it you throw things together because getting it to work at all is such a challenge. Then as time goes on you start to learn the things that bit you on the ass before and you slowly start becoming more and more perfectionist to try and avoid having to go through them again.
Finally, you realise that you're actually spending more time trying to avoid the problems than it would take to fix them, then you return to a process of throwing it together smartly; some bits are worth doing right once, others are worth just doing because you're going to change it later. The exact balance between the two just comes down to experience.
I think that quite a few of the passages in the 'Tao of Programming' explain this better. And its worth a read if you haven't before because it is very funny.
I think you should pick it back up again, worked well enough for Coleridge;^)
You've highlighted one of the basic problems with all of the 3d desktop pipe-dreams that I've seen so far. They all try and replicate the real-world. Well, there's a reason we generally use 2d items (paper, collections of paper, collections of collections of paper...) in the real world - realistic 3d interfaces suck for abstract information. How many people become sculptors? Think there's a reason for that?
I say go with the completely abstract interface, we may find something much more usable that what we have so far. Think of an application with a real 3d interface, think of an application that connects to wikipedia and as you explore it it unfolds like a piece of origami. Information that is more closely linked has fewer folds between it and the app trys to unfold it such a way as to minimize some metric, say the amount of rotation to get between similar subjects.
The point of the abstract worlds that we can create is that they are only limited by our imaginations - not physical constraints.
We now return to your regularly scheduled flamings and beowolf jokes...
Errr;^) That was my point. The article is about the Nehemiah processor, the only difference for the new form factor is that there is a new package for the chip. I was arguing that they are "fast enough".
Lemme get this straight, doing well in academia is the answer but the only good thing in your academic curriculum is a side research project because your main classes don't teach thinking?
Yes;^) Although it doesn't seem to make sense there is a complete change between doing an undergraduate degree and doing a postgrad. The brakes are taken off and you are encouraged to do interesting original work instead of following the mould. In order to do this most postgrads have to be taught how to think for the first time in their lives... Beyond the postgrad lies academia, so he is right that the answer is to escape into academia and that you have to suffer through a lot of boring crap to get there.
Not really. The 1Ghz nehemiah next to me has no problems decoding divx movies that a P3-500 can't handle. I'm not sure exactly, but I think its about the same as a P3-800.
My assumption is that its the other way entirely. That we all have a unique personal lexicon of internal thought processes that are shoe horned into a common subset that we call language. After all, everybodies brain is wired differently according to their sensory experiences during their development. I'd assume that we all learn a unique private mapping from our own unique internal representation to the common set of labels that form a language.
A: This is a model number. AMD identifies the AMD Athlon XP processor using model numbers, as opposed to megahertz. Model numbers are designed to communicate the relative application performance among the various AMD Athlon XP processors. As additional evidence that performance is not based on megahertz alone: the AMD Athlon XP processor 3200+ operates at a frequency of 2.2GHz yet can outperform an Intel Pentium(R) 4 processor operating at 3.0GHz with an 800 FSB and HyperThreading on a broad array of real-world applications for office productivity, digital media and 3-D gaming.
Do you not even understand what you've quoted? The PR numbers are relative to a base AMD chip, not relative to intel P4's.
I think that you're a little harsh on the kernel developers. If you read the whole advisory (especially the part about how to exploit this) and then read the code, its quite a chain of events that leads to an exploitable situation.
Much like being good at chess, or perhaps crosswords, finding these types of vulnerabilities takes a lot of lateral thinking and quite a few imaginative leaps. The simple fact is that the code in the kernel is complicated, that leads to lots of possible contexts for lots of possible code paths to be executed in. Finding these holes in just one of those paths in a particular context is hard.
On your last point, this is something that is covered in most verification courses. There is always 'one more bug' in any piece of software (as long as it isn't completely trivial). Its really a philisophical question as to whether finding a new bug should make you think the software is more or less secure. Personally I would tend to go with the approach that the more bugs that are found - the less are left.
Its an interesting contradiction between the two sources as you say. It does make you wonder how much politics went into the decisions made on what the report should be about. After all, deciding to focus / not focus on things can change the balance of a document quite clearly. Yes, hopefully someone out there is doing research on the wider impact of the disaster.
How does this account fit with the stories being told in this forum from people who were either a) there or b) knew people that were there?
They suggest a much higher death toll than 39 people.
In fact some of the pictures clearly demonstrate this. If one looks at the flora and the fauna in the pictures we see groups of wild animals happily running along totally oblivious to the radiation.
As others have pointed out further up, nature is quite happy as long as something reproduces before it dies. People put more of an emphasis on quality of life and not dying from cancer...
Yeah I can vouch for that. Coming off the back of a moped onto a tarmac road at 45-50mph is nothing compared to what dropping a real bike will do to you but it still took 3 months for all the skin to grow back. That was wearing sandals and shorts but the principle is the same
I know what you mean, it really does make you stop and think doesn't it? Not just the surrealness of the place but the way the article captures the feeling of a 'dead place'.
It made me think thank fuck the cold war never went hot. Every major city in the western world could have been like this and there would have been nowhere for us to go to. The part about the evacuation of the hospital after the head doctor died of cancer really brings it home.
No its good science. I'm suprised that more people aren't aware of this. Quite a few people that I know have noticed independently that coin-tosses aren't fair in the way that most people do them. A full toss (e.g. coin in the air over your head to the ground like in cricket) seems to be fair but when people casually flip a coin about 12 inches up and catch it the bias is much stronger than 49%/51%.
You don't need a machine to be able to reproduce these conditions, with practice it comes quite naturally. I can flip a coin so it lands same side up about 9/10 times, after all that's the reason I got the nice room in the flat and my flatmate got the one without an en-suite shower...
is not who has two monitors but who has four? So is that a really cute mock-up on the first page of the article or does somebody actually sell such a thing. The 'flower' arrangement of four tfts on a single stand. That would kick some serious ass...
Or you could just use the off-the-shelf components that do it already. Here's a good background: http://www.theseus.com/FramesTech.htm
More is available from: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/async/background/in dex.htm l
You have a tradeoff because the 'wires' are actually pairs of wires and the gates are more complex but you win because of the power-savings in not having to drive a clock through the chip. Manchester's AMULET project has been around for quite a while now, they have a working chip design thats quite similar to an ARM design.
Another style of tri-stating circuiting is when you use a pair of wires to carry each signal, allowing four combinations. 3 of them are used to allow a tristate logic, I think null-state is the commercial term for it. It's used in asynchronous (unclocked) chip designs. The third state is basically used as a wavefront to propagate timing information so that you don't need to drive a clock across the circuit. This reduces the complexity and allows the chip to operate at the maximum speed of the problem (eg the longest combinatorial circuit length in the chip) - great for low power designs. They things 'adapt' to the computation that they are running to a certain extent, even changing speed depending on the environmental temperature.
Not if they've implemented it in any sensible manner at all. What you describe is the worst possible spatial organisation structure as it holds lots of empty space for sparse data-sets. Furthermore, each server could simply execute another copy of the software and you have twice as much land.
What you are missing, and is quite obvious is that a virtual simulation of land is not a physical entity and that any such restriction is artificial. It is simply software and as such you can run more of it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is similar to what I thought when I read the tag at the top. How can it be daunting? Surely if he wants to become a geek then the *key* part is the challenge, if there were no challenge then it wouldn't be geeking. Geeks thrive on doing the hard stuff because they can. Maybe he's just a wannabe poser... As for something to get started on, well, like the parent says the API's are complicated just big. Pick something that you want to do, and do it. Yes it'll be a bit hard to get started but that is the point, and if you really do want the challenge then you'll enjoy it
No, the substitution of drinking does not make the argument as valid as the original. Prohibition has been tried and it failed, that's why I thought that I'd use that argument. I agree with you that that it is a balancing act between the common good and individual rights, but I don't think that what you are vouching for is a balance; its just restriction.
I agree with the poster that you were replying to that there is nothing inherently about drinking or gambling, people see them as such because of their religious backgrounds. As a society the restrictions that we make should be on the things that we all agree are wrong. When somebody drinks to excess, or takes drugs to excess and then has behaviour that is outside the bounds of what society deems acceptable - then they should be punished for that. Trying to solve it by restricting everybodies ability to drink, or take drugs is counterproductive because everyone can see that it is only to stop a small minority and assumes that they fall within the majority.
Gambling is the same sort of behaviour. There is nothing inherently wrong with gambling, the only problem is that a small minority of people cannot gamble sensibly, restricting the rights of the majority to try and target that minority will not work, and furthermore is an unfair restriction on most people.
Perhaps not. If their tax structure is sufficently different then they'll still get the business. Most of the UK betting sites are based off-shore for tax reasons.
I'm not religious and I don't see that more drinking is a good thing. It may be an individual choice to drink, but if 100% of people chose to drink heavily we would have massive social disruption. As it is every idiot who blows their nest egg due to a drinking habit is another idiot that you and I get to finance the retirement of via Social Security and Medicare (aka welfare for old folks).
As well as drinking you could try this with drug-taking, or how about breeding even? Your argument is clearly flawed as you're arguing that people should have their freedoms restricted so that you don't have to face the possibility that you'll have support the common good that you speak of.
If we follow your line of argument to its logical conclusion then maybe we should just start telling people what they can do to make it easier for them and assume everything else ist verboten?
I think that this is a process that turns full circle after you've been doing it for long enough. (I'm mentally slapping myself at this point for thinking of myself of an 'old man' of programming at the age of 25!) When you start doing it you throw things together because getting it to work at all is such a challenge. Then as time goes on you start to learn the things that bit you on the ass before and you slowly start becoming more and more perfectionist to try and avoid having to go through them again.
Finally, you realise that you're actually spending more time trying to avoid the problems than it would take to fix them, then you return to a process of throwing it together smartly; some bits are worth doing right once, others are worth just doing because you're going to change it later. The exact balance between the two just comes down to experience.
I think that quite a few of the passages in the 'Tao of Programming' explain this better. And its worth a read if you haven't before because it is very funny.
I think you should pick it back up again, worked well enough for Coleridge ;^)
You've highlighted one of the basic problems with all of the 3d desktop pipe-dreams that I've seen so far. They all try and replicate the real-world. Well, there's a reason we generally use 2d items (paper, collections of paper, collections of collections of paper...) in the real world - realistic 3d interfaces suck for abstract information. How many people become sculptors? Think there's a reason for that?
I say go with the completely abstract interface, we may find something much more usable that what we have so far. Think of an application with a real 3d interface, think of an application that connects to wikipedia and as you explore it it unfolds like a piece of origami. Information that is more closely linked has fewer folds between it and the app trys to unfold it such a way as to minimize some metric, say the amount of rotation to get between similar subjects.
The point of the abstract worlds that we can create is that they are only limited by our imaginations - not physical constraints.
We now return to your regularly scheduled flamings and beowolf jokes...
Errr ;^) That was my point. The article is about the Nehemiah processor, the only difference for the new form factor is that there is a new package for the chip. I was arguing that they are "fast enough".
Lemme get this straight, doing well in academia is the answer but the only good thing in your academic curriculum is a side research project because your main classes don't teach thinking?
;^) Although it doesn't seem to make sense there is a complete change between doing an undergraduate degree and doing a postgrad. The brakes are taken off and you are encouraged to do interesting original work instead of following the mould. In order to do this most postgrads have to be taught how to think for the first time in their lives... Beyond the postgrad lies academia, so he is right that the answer is to escape into academia and that you have to suffer through a lot of boring crap to get there.
Yes
Not really. The 1Ghz nehemiah next to me has no problems decoding divx movies that a P3-500 can't handle. I'm not sure exactly, but I think its about the same as a P3-800.
Yeah it sounds like we have quite similar thoughts on the subject - possibly as a result of similar internal processes ;^)
My assumption is that its the other way entirely. That we all have a unique personal lexicon of internal thought processes that are shoe horned into a common subset that we call language. After all, everybodies brain is wired differently according to their sensory experiences during their development. I'd assume that we all learn a unique private mapping from our own unique internal representation to the common set of labels that form a language.
Err, I take it that you are aware that :x is a shorter form of :wq?
A: This is a model number. AMD identifies the AMD Athlon XP processor using model numbers, as opposed to megahertz. Model numbers are designed to communicate the relative application performance among the various AMD Athlon XP processors. As additional evidence that performance is not based on megahertz alone: the AMD Athlon XP processor 3200+ operates at a frequency of 2.2GHz yet can outperform an Intel Pentium(R) 4 processor operating at 3.0GHz with an 800 FSB and HyperThreading on a broad array of real-world applications for office productivity, digital media and 3-D gaming.
Do you not even understand what you've quoted? The PR numbers are relative to a base AMD chip, not relative to intel P4's.
I think that you're a little harsh on the kernel developers. If you read the whole advisory (especially the part about how to exploit this) and then read the code, its quite a chain of events that leads to an exploitable situation.
Much like being good at chess, or perhaps crosswords, finding these types of vulnerabilities takes a lot of lateral thinking and quite a few imaginative leaps. The simple fact is that the code in the kernel is complicated, that leads to lots of possible contexts for lots of possible code paths to be executed in. Finding these holes in just one of those paths in a particular context is hard.
On your last point, this is something that is covered in most verification courses. There is always 'one more bug' in any piece of software (as long as it isn't completely trivial). Its really a philisophical question as to whether finding a new bug should make you think the software is more or less secure. Personally I would tend to go with the approach that the more bugs that are found - the less are left.
Its an interesting contradiction between the two sources as you say. It does make you wonder how much politics went into the decisions made on what the report should be about. After all, deciding to focus / not focus on things can change the balance of a document quite clearly. Yes, hopefully someone out there is doing research on the wider impact of the disaster.
How does this account fit with the stories being told in this forum from people who were either a) there or b) knew people that were there?
They suggest a much higher death toll than 39 people.
In fact some of the pictures clearly demonstrate this. If one looks at the flora and the fauna in the pictures we see groups of wild animals happily running along totally oblivious to the radiation.
As others have pointed out further up, nature is quite happy as long as something reproduces before it dies. People put more of an emphasis on quality of life and not dying from cancer...
Yeah I can vouch for that. Coming off the back of a moped onto a tarmac road at 45-50mph is nothing compared to what dropping a real bike will do to you but it still took 3 months for all the skin to grow back. That was wearing sandals and shorts but the principle is the same
I know what you mean, it really does make you stop and think doesn't it? Not just the surrealness of the place but the way the article captures the feeling of a 'dead place'.
It made me think thank fuck the cold war never went hot. Every major city in the western world could have been like this and there would have been nowhere for us to go to. The part about the evacuation of the hospital after the head doctor died of cancer really brings it home.
No its good science. I'm suprised that more people aren't aware of this. Quite a few people that I know have noticed independently that coin-tosses aren't fair in the way that most people do them. A full toss (e.g. coin in the air over your head to the ground like in cricket) seems to be fair but when people casually flip a coin about 12 inches up and catch it the bias is much stronger than 49%/51%.
You don't need a machine to be able to reproduce these conditions, with practice it comes quite naturally. I can flip a coin so it lands same side up about 9/10 times, after all that's the reason I got the nice room in the flat and my flatmate got the one without an en-suite shower...
Wow! The legend himself, so whats it like being one of the biggest weirdest kooks on the internet? Does it float your boat?
is not who has two monitors but who has four? So is that a really cute mock-up on the first page of the article or does somebody actually sell such a thing. The 'flower' arrangement of four tfts on a single stand. That would kick some serious ass...
Jeez... and all I wanted was a rabid pentium with fricking lazer beams attached to it...
Or you could just use the off-the-shelf components that do it already. Here's a good background:m
n dex.htm l
http://www.theseus.com/FramesTech.ht
More is available from:
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/async/background/i
You have a tradeoff because the 'wires' are actually pairs of wires and the gates are more complex but you win because of the power-savings in not having to drive a clock through the chip. Manchester's AMULET project has been around for quite a while now, they have a working chip design thats quite similar to an ARM design.
Another style of tri-stating circuiting is when you use a pair of wires to carry each signal, allowing four combinations. 3 of them are used to allow a tristate logic, I think null-state is the commercial term for it. It's used in asynchronous (unclocked) chip designs. The third state is basically used as a wavefront to propagate timing information so that you don't need to drive a clock across the circuit. This reduces the complexity and allows the chip to operate at the maximum speed of the problem (eg the longest combinatorial circuit length in the chip) - great for low power designs. They things 'adapt' to the computation that they are running to a certain extent, even changing speed depending on the environmental temperature.
Not if they've implemented it in any sensible manner at all. What you describe is the worst possible spatial organisation structure as it holds lots of empty space for sparse data-sets. Furthermore, each server could simply execute another copy of the software and you have twice as much land. What you are missing, and is quite obvious is that a virtual simulation of land is not a physical entity and that any such restriction is artificial. It is simply software and as such you can run more of it.