My fave new-to-root lossage was clattering along doing some admin task as root, the details of which I've long forgotten. I type the following:
# kill <missed the percent key>1<return>
Expletives deleted.
P.S. For newbs and non-*nix folks: "kill %1" kills the previous program run by the user in the background. "kill 1" kills the init process, which instantly crashed the system.;-)
Sigh. Here's the facts of Hard-drive based music player life folks:
They CANNOT skip. A sufficiently hard shock, in the right direction, at the wrong time, might auger the drive head into the platter. That would kill your player, but is most unlikely in recent generation devices, especially from the shock experienced in exercise type activites (any superheroes out there are excluded.;-)
For reasons of (primarily) power consumption and (secondarily) shock resistance, all HDD players run the drive in _very_ brief and relatively infrequent spurts to load up an internal RAM playback buffer.
Come now, Google on "anvils" brings up some basic hits, the first one of which (http://www.oldworldanvils.com/) looks fairly interesting.;-) Dig around online for info on hunting up new/used anvils and other forge equipment.
But first things first: 1) dig up books on the subject. Check out Jim Hrisoulas' bladesmithing books. The first has a wealth of good basic material. That and later books also move quickly into Jim's specialty of advanced pattern welding techniques (See his website at http://atar.com/). 2) Nothing beats practical mentoring in a discipline such as smith-work. See if you can arrange to get classes/apprenticeship time with a smith in your area.
Actually, there's an easy solution to this, and Id Software has already implemented it: open source the game and engine after its major profit cycle has run down. It's probably fairly trivial for them to make it run w/o Steam activation before doing so.
If they didn't want to open source it (or couldn't due to third-party IP in the codebase), they could still do away with Steam for some future "Half Life 2, Classics Edition" release in 3-5 years or so.
The Great Hammer of RTFA hits. --more-- You feel compelled to greater efforts of literacy.
The comment even includes a link to the Frequently Raised Objections page which specifically addresses these and a number of other issues. This page discusses specific points that made prior similar ideas were impractical and addresses how this new variant addresses those problems. If you can't emit anything more coherent than an uninformed knee-jerk response, then STFU!
It's mostly marketing fluff, IMHO. CPUs don't spontaneously fail if they aren't put in machines assembled by idiots.
Er, whatever. I've encountered CPU failures in production systems. Nor do I have any reason to believe that the servers were "assembled by idiots", or that there was anything problematic about the datacenter environment (cooling, power, etc). Work in an environment with enough 24x7 production boxen and you're bound to see all manner of component failures.
Moreover, IBM wouldn't be using current fab lines to make POWER series processors at design rules with comfortable margins (lowering potential clock rate) just for "marketing". That makes no sense. Instead they'd do just what was done for the PowerPC chip lines -- they'd shrink the design rule and up the clock rate to get improved performance.
Wow. Artful and elegant rebalancing of engineering tradeoffs for very diferent markets reduced to a knee-jerk oversimplification in one fell swoop. And it got a +5 Insightful for that, too boot. Here are some reasons why the "stripped it down a bit so we don't cut into our own market" statement is ridiculous:
If selling POWER series chips to Apple was going to undermine IBM's server business, IBM would have a hell of a lot more to worry about from the plain 'ol x86 market.
IBM's POWER-series chips are designed to trade away ultra-high-speed clock rates in favor of low failure rates. The design rule (feature size on chip) is pulled back from the bleeding edge and other layout techniques are employed to make these processors rock solid, to avoid costly downtime from hardware failures in business servers.
These days Apple is well known for its forays into the cluster computing space -- but that's a far cry from the sort of transactional throughput capacity of IBM's high-end servers. I.e. not the same markets!
I don't know of too many applications other than faders and musical instruments that require fingerpress chords.
Sure, I can think of a great application set that requires multipress sensitivity: every application that doesn't require multipress sensitivity. Ever been annoyed by an accidental finger brushing against your laptop touchpad, sending the pointer to oblivion? By doing some basic "finger tracking" a multipress touch interface can choose to ignore spurious brushes against the touch surface -- very useful even for single-pointer usage.
FWIW, the earliest example of this sort of finger tracking that I'm aware of is the "Continuum" continuous-surface music keyboard developed at UIUC. A Continuum has no discrete keys -- just a smooth rectangular surface roughly the same area as a conventional set of 88 music keys would cover. This surface tracks for three degrees of freedom for each finger: up/down position, left/right position, and pressure. The finger tracking worked as follows: the Continuum kept track of finger positions over time so that a newly landed finger would trigger a musical "attack", while held fingers could freely move around the surface to manipulate a sustained sound.
Re:No. $500 for ADC membership that comes with ext
on
Tiger Early Start Kit
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'll also note that there is a "no-frills, no-bennies, no-cost" ADC membership option. It's good for going to grab recent versions of XCode, SDKs, and misc other online dev resources that Apple provides free of charge. This level works great for MacOS X open source or shareware dev types, hobbyists, etc.
You're being ridiculous. What computer company could come between me and a pile of MP3's? Not gonna happen.
Not between you and your pile of MP3's, of course. They'll come between you and your pile of DRM'ed music files, AAC or otherwise. The meaning of "I bought some music today" will change in the face of the business logic of DRM code. That's the vision, notwithstanding that some of us can see the trap before it's sprung.
Think of it this way: the DMCA provides a callback hook into U.S. law for software and firmware code. I.e. a corporation can write any "law" they want that can be realized in DRM business logic and pertains to the use and distribution of content.
I'm shocked, shocked 8-) that no one seems to have linked the LinuxBIOS project yet.
I highly recommend checking out the project history and overview of architectural and design decisions they've made. Fascinating stuff. (Check the "papers" link on the left side, IIRC.)
Here's a snippet from the project homepage to whet your appetites:
Other beneficial consequences of using LinuxBIOS include needing only two working motors to boot (cpu fan and power supply), fast boot times (current fastest is 3 seconds), and freedom from proprietary (buggy) BIOS code, to name a few. These secondary benefits are numerous and have helped gain support from many vendors in both the high performance computing as well as embedded computing markets.
Apple, on the other hand, probably has no plans to sell replacement antennas for its Airport devices and will only get certification for its standard antenna.
Perhaps a poor example, since all current Airport Extreme models have an external antenna connector...
Just compare a reasonably complex regular expression to the BNF form of a grammar for parsing the same input to see how much easier GLR is to use
And this is part of why many Perl folks have eben eagerly awaiting for Damian Conway to release Perl6::Rules. ooh! Looks like an version 0.03 is finally on cpan!
That's security through obsurity, really, isn't it?
You fail to understand the security community's use of "security through obscurity." In its proper context, this phrase means that one attempts to secure (for example) an implementation of a security protocol by not disseminating information about how that system works. For example, if someone creates a new asymmetric encryption algorithm, and does not subject it to publication and the scrutiny of peer review... then that's security through obscurity. Security through obscurity, for topics like encryption algos, is heavily frowned upon. Historically, peer review has proven best able to create robust protocols and implementations.
Locking down multiple layers in the network stack has another phrase that is very applicable: "defense in depth". I.e. if one of your security measures fails, you are wholly or partially protected by one or more other security measures. Defense in depth is generally considered to be a good technique to employ.
In the sense that the poster used "part of the OS" to imply that the realtime scheduling was required for IE's performance, the original poster was dead wrong. I'll leave pointless semantic seesawing over what is and is not "the OS" to various camps' zealot warriors.
'bents can be fairly awesome in a number of regards. Not to mention that there are some fantastic recumbent touring bikes. 'bents have a wide spectrum of designs, all with a different balance of strengths and weaknesses than traditional diamond frame bikes. But the problem of "interest" is nonexistant. The problem is that the rather conservative international governing body of cycling (apologies, it's fallen out of my acronym cache -- UCI, maybe?) long ago prohibited the use of recumbents when the first low-racer caused a decidedly middle-grade rider to whomp the competition.
As many sports governing bodies, they must walk the often rather arbitrary line between allowing new technologies and keeping the competition between the athletes instead of between athletes' gear.
As an example of the reverse case, long-track ice skating allowed the introduction of the front-hinged "clap skates" in the 90's (versus older fixed-frame skates). These skates are much more efficient from a biomechanical standpoint. Enough so that every long-track record was broken and re-broken in short order as skaters embraced and trained to the new tecnology. There was some regulatory turmoil at their initial introduction, but only because the new skates weren't available to all skaters who wanted them.
On one hand, as the sports technology has changed, it has become impossible to make meaningful comparisons between today's athletes and those athletes who set records years ago. On the other hand, technological advances have so radically altered athletic training that it's still impossible to "compare" modern athletes with those of yesteryear. How good would one of the great Olympians from the 1950's have been if they'd trained using modern techniques and tools?
IE isn't "part of the OS" any more than Apache is "part of the OS". IE is just another user-space application, with one exception: it's always running. When you "load" IE by clicking on the blue e, iexplorer.exe is already in memory and just pops open a window. You can get the same effect by just keeping a Firefox window open and using Ctrl-N (new window) or Ctrl-T (new tab) as needed. If it's taking up screen space, then just minimize it.
Don't make Firefox run realtime, unless you really want your browser stealing cycles for useless cycling GIF animations.
FWIW, I seem to recall that Mozilla had long ago integrated it's own speed load akin to what IE does (aka runs as a daemon). Hasn't this been implemented for Firefox/W32 yet?
I've seen this display (actually, IBM's Roentgen display, the immediate predecessor of the Viewsonic model). It is utterly fantastic, with some caveats.
It was originally designed to have the resolution and quality needed for certain xray diagnostics and other image-sensitive telemedicine applications as a primary market (thus the Roentgen name -- the discoverer of X-Rays). One of the demos I saw used a modified version of (IIRC) Framemaker to display a document with footnotes with a 4pt physical size. The serifs on the font were clearly visible, with no eyestrain (due to the monitor, anyways;-) or blockyness. The detail on high-res museum art scans was astonishing.
HOWEVER, this is roughly a 200dpi display -- current operating systems simply aren't designed for screens with pixel density this high. GUI widgets and text are often ridiculously small.
That, plus the original display required a four-head graphics card (or cards w/ four total outputs) to drive it. Looks like the newer Viewsonic uses four separate DVI-D connections.
Many people would like to turn more details on in games.
Exactly. Back in SGI's 1990s heydays, that was one of the killer things about the high-end systems with an Infinite Reality graphics pipeline. (Or N pipelines for the really cool boxen...;-) You could turn on every bell and whistle in OpenGL and the IR pipes wouldn't blink.
Pixel pushing is nice for higher res monitors and framerate... but with the fantastic programmable pipeline features (e.g. shaders) in recent hardware, performance under "bell and whistle" load can be a better metric of how far game designers can take their rendering engine.
...is to be a teeny-tiny niche market, like Linux handhelds
The market probably won't be huge, but that has nothing to do with it's RPN-ness or Linux-ness. That has to do with relatively small numbers of folks who need a powerful math appliance.
On the other hand, this has the potential to be the iPod of the Mathematically Inclined. If the software and industrial design are done well, it has serious hope to be a hit on college campuses, as well as with a variety of technical professionals.
The movie business operates on a pay-per-view basis and having too much product available in the theatres and video stores can only work to drive down the price that the audience is willing to pay for the product.
Your statement seems intuitively true from an Economics 101 standpoint, but theater audience behavior is actually a little more complicated. A phenomenon has been observed where a show's ticket sales are boosted when release dates are in a cluster near other popular movies. (Apologies; I don't have a proper citation handy.) Rougly put, the theory used to explain these observations is: once someone has gotten out to a movie, they're in a moviegoing mindset, and are thus likely to see other interesting shows near enough in time. I.e. people will spend more total money on a set of films of interest with closely spaced releases than if those movies are released relatively far apart.
In this light, the phenomenon of movie "seasons" (e.g. summer "blockbusters" and holiday season) isn't random happenstance -- it's market optimization.
"Hollywood" studio execs certainly have issues these days, but I don't think that over-releasing is nearly the biggest problem.
I think the one thing that we're all waiting for is the introduction of on-chip system memory.
Sorry, I prefer cheap commodity computing. Such a scheme would be VERY expensive. An expensive crutch programmers who got a 'D-' in computer architecture because of an utter failure to comprehend the memory heirarchy. An all RAM on die scheme would be an enourmous waste of money, as vast, contiguous regions would sit idle. No one does this at any scale of computing because caching strategies get us the vast majority of the benefit of such a scheme at *much* lower cost.
It would require a technological revolution that enabled a very high-speed, low-power, non-volatile memory solution that could supplant all RAM (cache or otherwise) and possibly disk media, too. Maybe MRAM or a related technology will give us this someday, but not while current assumptions hold.
Some memory-intensive applications can be satisfied simply by employing more cache RAM to cover the active memory footprint. Likewise, programmers already optimize algorithms for large memory footprints to take advantage of the memory heirarchy. See articles online about the introduction of tile-based processing to the GIMP some years back for an example of this.
It might seem nice to solve the Lazy Programmer's memory problems via scads of on-die memory, but this would help only a tiny fraction of apps. Most programs exhibit high memory reference locality without any special effort by the programmer. A much better general purpose solution (from a programmer's perspective) would be a migration to an Aspect Oriented Programming platform. Dig around for some of the papers on Aspect Oriented Programming and image processing applications. These early examples demonstrated an environment where optimization was specified seperately (orthogonally) to the image processing algos. I.e. the image processing algos could be understood without any of the code-mutation that optimization induces. Likewise, the optimization could be described on its own merits without getting "lost" in the noise of the particular problem being optimized. Done right, even the optimizations become separate, reusable components.
More elitist crap from the geek contingent is all I'm seeing.
No. The poster who griped about blogs clogging up Google is sadly myopic, and definitely not demonstrating solid geek cred. To paraphrase a friend of mine:
A great invention has been created that permits information to be stored and transmitted with unprecedented ease. So much so that we are now inundated with recorded thoughts. This great invention is papyrus.
Humanity has been dealing with this problem for a long time now: how to manage an ever growing body of recorded knowledge. Many mechanisms have been devised to sift the wheat from the chaff. Human approaches include editors and scientific peer review. Recent examples are online moderation and Google. It's an ever changing game. Recent technology has simply made the game fast enough that we actually see it play out before our eyes.
Instead of chlorine bleach, I just dump the shower curtain liner in the washing machine, on hot, with a bit of detergent and an oxygen-based bleach/cleanser. Bath mats go in, too. Works wonders, better than any spray-on approach I've tried.
Unsurprisingly, this also works great for smelly sports gear that's washing machine safe. And no, I *don't* mean your PS2 controller. 8-)
The equating of "very expensive rock" with "love" has always stumped me. I'd have to rate it as one of the greatest PR scams ever pulled...
Actually, that's about right. DeBeers' version of the "diamond age" is an impressive feat of marketing combined with agressive market control. It wasn't really that long ago that the "diamonds are a girl's best friend" meme was instilled in large portions of world culture.
But DeBeers' is hardly the only one who supports an entire industry with marketing tactics. For a real head-shaping check out "The Merchants of Cool" . A rather eye-opening tutorial on modern marketing tactics, and the whole progam is available online now...
Slashdot Mirror
My fave new-to-root lossage was clattering along doing some admin task as root, the details of which I've long forgotten. I type the following:
;-)
# kill <missed the percent key>1<return>
Expletives deleted.
P.S. For newbs and non-*nix folks: "kill %1" kills the previous program run by the user in the background. "kill 1" kills the init process, which instantly crashed the system.
Sigh. Here's the facts of Hard-drive based music player life folks:
Come now, Google on "anvils" brings up some basic hits, the first one of which (http://www.oldworldanvils.com/) looks fairly interesting. ;-) Dig around online for info on hunting up new/used anvils and other forge equipment.
But first things first: 1) dig up books on the subject. Check out Jim Hrisoulas' bladesmithing books. The first has a wealth of good basic material. That and later books also move quickly into Jim's specialty of advanced pattern welding techniques (See his website at http://atar.com/). 2) Nothing beats practical mentoring in a discipline such as smith-work. See if you can arrange to get classes/apprenticeship time with a smith in your area.
Enjoy!
Actually, there's an easy solution to this, and Id Software has already implemented it: open source the game and engine after its major profit cycle has run down. It's probably fairly trivial for them to make it run w/o Steam activation before doing so.
If they didn't want to open source it (or couldn't due to third-party IP in the codebase), they could still do away with Steam for some future "Half Life 2, Classics Edition" release in 3-5 years or so.
The Great Hammer of RTFA hits. --more--
You feel compelled to greater efforts of literacy.
The comment even includes a link to the Frequently Raised Objections page which specifically addresses these and a number of other issues. This page discusses specific points that made prior similar ideas were impractical and addresses how this new variant addresses those problems. If you can't emit anything more coherent than an uninformed knee-jerk response, then STFU!
It's mostly marketing fluff, IMHO. CPUs don't spontaneously fail if they aren't put in machines assembled by idiots.
Er, whatever. I've encountered CPU failures in production systems. Nor do I have any reason to believe that the servers were "assembled by idiots", or that there was anything problematic about the datacenter environment (cooling, power, etc). Work in an environment with enough 24x7 production boxen and you're bound to see all manner of component failures.
Moreover, IBM wouldn't be using current fab lines to make POWER series processors at design rules with comfortable margins (lowering potential clock rate) just for "marketing". That makes no sense. Instead they'd do just what was done for the PowerPC chip lines -- they'd shrink the design rule and up the clock rate to get improved performance.
I don't know of too many applications other than faders and musical instruments that require fingerpress chords.
Sure, I can think of a great application set that requires multipress sensitivity: every application that doesn't require multipress sensitivity. Ever been annoyed by an accidental finger brushing against your laptop touchpad, sending the pointer to oblivion? By doing some basic "finger tracking" a multipress touch interface can choose to ignore spurious brushes against the touch surface -- very useful even for single-pointer usage.
FWIW, the earliest example of this sort of finger tracking that I'm aware of is the "Continuum" continuous-surface music keyboard developed at UIUC. A Continuum has no discrete keys -- just a smooth rectangular surface roughly the same area as a conventional set of 88 music keys would cover. This surface tracks for three degrees of freedom for each finger: up/down position, left/right position, and pressure. The finger tracking worked as follows: the Continuum kept track of finger positions over time so that a newly landed finger would trigger a musical "attack", while held fingers could freely move around the surface to manipulate a sustained sound.
I'll also note that there is a "no-frills, no-bennies, no-cost" ADC membership option. It's good for going to grab recent versions of XCode, SDKs, and misc other online dev resources that Apple provides free of charge. This level works great for MacOS X open source or shareware dev types, hobbyists, etc.
You're being ridiculous. What computer company could come between me and a pile of MP3's? Not gonna happen.
Not between you and your pile of MP3's, of course. They'll come between you and your pile of DRM'ed music files, AAC or otherwise. The meaning of "I bought some music today" will change in the face of the business logic of DRM code. That's the vision, notwithstanding that some of us can see the trap before it's sprung.
Think of it this way: the DMCA provides a callback hook into U.S. law for software and firmware code. I.e. a corporation can write any "law" they want that can be realized in DRM business logic and pertains to the use and distribution of content.
I highly recommend checking out the project history and overview of architectural and design decisions they've made. Fascinating stuff. (Check the "papers" link on the left side, IIRC.)
Here's a snippet from the project homepage to whet your appetites:
Apple, on the other hand, probably has no plans to sell replacement antennas for its Airport devices and will only get certification for its standard antenna.
Perhaps a poor example, since all current Airport Extreme models have an external antenna connector...
Just compare a reasonably complex regular expression to the BNF form of a grammar for parsing the same input to see how much easier GLR is to use
And this is part of why many Perl folks have eben eagerly awaiting for Damian Conway to release Perl6::Rules. ooh! Looks like an version 0.03 is finally on cpan!
That's security through obsurity, really, isn't it?
You fail to understand the security community's use of "security through obscurity." In its proper context, this phrase means that one attempts to secure (for example) an implementation of a security protocol by not disseminating information about how that system works. For example, if someone creates a new asymmetric encryption algorithm, and does not subject it to publication and the scrutiny of peer review... then that's security through obscurity. Security through obscurity, for topics like encryption algos, is heavily frowned upon. Historically, peer review has proven best able to create robust protocols and implementations.
Locking down multiple layers in the network stack has another phrase that is very applicable: "defense in depth". I.e. if one of your security measures fails, you are wholly or partially protected by one or more other security measures. Defense in depth is generally considered to be a good technique to employ.
In the sense that the poster used "part of the OS" to imply that the realtime scheduling was required for IE's performance, the original poster was dead wrong. I'll leave pointless semantic seesawing over what is and is not "the OS" to various camps' zealot warriors.
'bents can be fairly awesome in a number of regards. Not to mention that there are some fantastic recumbent touring bikes. 'bents have a wide spectrum of designs, all with a different balance of strengths and weaknesses than traditional diamond frame bikes. But the problem of "interest" is nonexistant. The problem is that the rather conservative international governing body of cycling (apologies, it's fallen out of my acronym cache -- UCI, maybe?) long ago prohibited the use of recumbents when the first low-racer caused a decidedly middle-grade rider to whomp the competition.
As many sports governing bodies, they must walk the often rather arbitrary line between allowing new technologies and keeping the competition between the athletes instead of between athletes' gear.
As an example of the reverse case, long-track ice skating allowed the introduction of the front-hinged "clap skates" in the 90's (versus older fixed-frame skates). These skates are much more efficient from a biomechanical standpoint. Enough so that every long-track record was broken and re-broken in short order as skaters embraced and trained to the new tecnology. There was some regulatory turmoil at their initial introduction, but only because the new skates weren't available to all skaters who wanted them.
On one hand, as the sports technology has changed, it has become impossible to make meaningful comparisons between today's athletes and those athletes who set records years ago. On the other hand, technological advances have so radically altered athletic training that it's still impossible to "compare" modern athletes with those of yesteryear. How good would one of the great Olympians from the 1950's have been if they'd trained using modern techniques and tools?
NO, NO, NO.
IE isn't "part of the OS" any more than Apache is "part of the OS". IE is just another user-space application, with one exception: it's always running. When you "load" IE by clicking on the blue e, iexplorer.exe is already in memory and just pops open a window. You can get the same effect by just keeping a Firefox window open and using Ctrl-N (new window) or Ctrl-T (new tab) as needed. If it's taking up screen space, then just minimize it.
Don't make Firefox run realtime, unless you really want your browser stealing cycles for useless cycling GIF animations.
FWIW, I seem to recall that Mozilla had long ago integrated it's own speed load akin to what IE does (aka runs as a daemon). Hasn't this been implemented for Firefox/W32 yet?
I've seen this display (actually, IBM's Roentgen display, the immediate predecessor of the Viewsonic model). It is utterly fantastic, with some caveats.
;-) or blockyness. The detail on high-res museum art scans was astonishing.
It was originally designed to have the resolution and quality needed for certain xray diagnostics and other image-sensitive telemedicine applications as a primary market (thus the Roentgen name -- the discoverer of X-Rays). One of the demos I saw used a modified version of (IIRC) Framemaker to display a document with footnotes with a 4pt physical size. The serifs on the font were clearly visible, with no eyestrain (due to the monitor, anyways
HOWEVER, this is roughly a 200dpi display -- current operating systems simply aren't designed for screens with pixel density this high. GUI widgets and text are often ridiculously small.
That, plus the original display required a four-head graphics card (or cards w/ four total outputs) to drive it. Looks like the newer Viewsonic uses four separate DVI-D connections.
Many people would like to turn more details on in games.
;-) You could turn on every bell and whistle in OpenGL and the IR pipes wouldn't blink.
Exactly. Back in SGI's 1990s heydays, that was one of the killer things about the high-end systems with an Infinite Reality graphics pipeline. (Or N pipelines for the really cool boxen...
Pixel pushing is nice for higher res monitors and framerate... but with the fantastic programmable pipeline features (e.g. shaders) in recent hardware, performance under "bell and whistle" load can be a better metric of how far game designers can take their rendering engine.
The market probably won't be huge, but that has nothing to do with it's RPN-ness or Linux-ness. That has to do with relatively small numbers of folks who need a powerful math appliance.
On the other hand, this has the potential to be the iPod of the Mathematically Inclined. If the software and industrial design are done well, it has serious hope to be a hit on college campuses, as well as with a variety of technical professionals.
The movie business operates on a pay-per-view basis and having too much product available in the theatres and video stores can only work to drive down the price that the audience is willing to pay for the product.
Your statement seems intuitively true from an Economics 101 standpoint, but theater audience behavior is actually a little more complicated. A phenomenon has been observed where a show's ticket sales are boosted when release dates are in a cluster near other popular movies. (Apologies; I don't have a proper citation handy.) Rougly put, the theory used to explain these observations is: once someone has gotten out to a movie, they're in a moviegoing mindset, and are thus likely to see other interesting shows near enough in time. I.e. people will spend more total money on a set of films of interest with closely spaced releases than if those movies are released relatively far apart.
In this light, the phenomenon of movie "seasons" (e.g. summer "blockbusters" and holiday season) isn't random happenstance -- it's market optimization.
"Hollywood" studio execs certainly have issues these days, but I don't think that over-releasing is nearly the biggest problem.
I think the one thing that we're all waiting for is the introduction of on-chip system memory.
Sorry, I prefer cheap commodity computing. Such a scheme would be VERY expensive. An expensive crutch programmers who got a 'D-' in computer architecture because of an utter failure to comprehend the memory heirarchy. An all RAM on die scheme would be an enourmous waste of money, as vast, contiguous regions would sit idle. No one does this at any scale of computing because caching strategies get us the vast majority of the benefit of such a scheme at *much* lower cost.
It would require a technological revolution that enabled a very high-speed, low-power, non-volatile memory solution that could supplant all RAM (cache or otherwise) and possibly disk media, too. Maybe MRAM or a related technology will give us this someday, but not while current assumptions hold.
Some memory-intensive applications can be satisfied simply by employing more cache RAM to cover the active memory footprint. Likewise, programmers already optimize algorithms for large memory footprints to take advantage of the memory heirarchy. See articles online about the introduction of tile-based processing to the GIMP some years back for an example of this.
It might seem nice to solve the Lazy Programmer's memory problems via scads of on-die memory, but this would help only a tiny fraction of apps. Most programs exhibit high memory reference locality without any special effort by the programmer. A much better general purpose solution (from a programmer's perspective) would be a migration to an Aspect Oriented Programming platform. Dig around for some of the papers on Aspect Oriented Programming and image processing applications. These early examples demonstrated an environment where optimization was specified seperately (orthogonally) to the image processing algos. I.e. the image processing algos could be understood without any of the code-mutation that optimization induces. Likewise, the optimization could be described on its own merits without getting "lost" in the noise of the particular problem being optimized. Done right, even the optimizations become separate, reusable components.
No. The poster who griped about blogs clogging up Google is sadly myopic, and definitely not demonstrating solid geek cred. To paraphrase a friend of mine:
Humanity has been dealing with this problem for a long time now: how to manage an ever growing body of recorded knowledge. Many mechanisms have been devised to sift the wheat from the chaff. Human approaches include editors and scientific peer review. Recent examples are online moderation and Google. It's an ever changing game. Recent technology has simply made the game fast enough that we actually see it play out before our eyes.
Instead of chlorine bleach, I just dump the shower curtain liner in the washing machine, on hot, with a bit of detergent and an oxygen-based bleach/cleanser. Bath mats go in, too. Works wonders, better than any spray-on approach I've tried.
Unsurprisingly, this also works great for smelly sports gear that's washing machine safe. And no, I *don't* mean your PS2 controller. 8-)
The equating of "very expensive rock" with "love" has always stumped me. I'd have to rate it as one of the greatest PR scams ever pulled...
Actually, that's about right. DeBeers' version of the "diamond age" is an impressive feat of marketing combined with agressive market control. It wasn't really that long ago that the "diamonds are a girl's best friend" meme was instilled in large portions of world culture.
But DeBeers' is hardly the only one who supports an entire industry with marketing tactics. For a real head-shaping check out "The Merchants of Cool" . A rather eye-opening tutorial on modern marketing tactics, and the whole progam is available online now...