The problem with nexus was not the difficulty (although that was a issue, too), but the user interface (the first game i couldnt even move a ship without reading the manual. And that went on into the details. Very non-intuitive all the way) the non-existing feedback in many situations ("why the fuck does that damn ship turn now?" "why doesnt anything happen?") and the weapon balancing... sure mass drivers shouldnt work well against shielded target or so, but it was really boring to wait 20 minutes until you finally nibbled a single ship to death if you didnt have the ideal loadout. And i consider "knowing what enemies will be there because i played it 5 times already" a cheat, and not a strategy that should be needed in each mission. A balanced loadout should leave a chance to win)
You know what statisics are? Even if the mtbf is 1billion years, if there are a billion media in use, one poor fellow will be fucked up in the first one. Its not like there is that mystical data after which all media fail....
you need more power to kill a bit (like in creating a electron/hole cascade or flipping a magnetic domain via particle interaction) than to fuck up a part of our dna.
If there is an gammaray burst or a supernova near enough to get the bits behind the metal of their enclosured/concrete of the houses,ect, we dont need to worry about data...
about the firefox thing: Its in bugzilla since 2001 or so. Generall consense of the developers:the codebase is so fucked up they dont know how to fix it, so they ignore it.
An A64 or P4 has 6GB for 4-6Gflops. If you do streaming MACS, you would need 2 loads and 1 store per 2 instructions-> 12byte per flop->176Gflops need 2Tbyte/s. Hope you get good cache hit rate. Just as an example: REAL vector computers can sustain their vector units from main memory.
Well, i have a bigger problem with the fact that THE top-of-the-line spacecraft of humanity will be scrapped after a mere decade... sure it might not be cutting edge anymore, but theres place for more than one ship in a starfleet...
Well, too be fair, cell uses some fairly stoned tricks to get to that kind of peak power. (the massive memory bandwith is only to small local memories (everywhere else you would call them cache) and the main memory bandwith is laughable compared to the computing resources. Although linpack is very nice to parallize, i dont think it would be possible to even get 10% of the theoretical rate on a cell.
Well, im not really up to date, but there are 2 canditates for dark matter: Machos (massive compact halo objects) and Wimps (weakly interacting massive particles). The latter are suppossed to be particles not being affected by any force but gravity (just like neutrinos are not affected by strong force or electromagnetic forces). Creation could have happened during the big band (those mysterious first 3 minutes). Machos OTOH would be normal matter, but "dark" in the sense of "no active emission". What you would normally expect from the name. Could be cold dust nebula, primordial black holes, all that stuff.
Dark matter is suspected because it HAS to be there in order for the physical rules to work (if you think that kind of reasoning is invalid, well, it served us well with the neutrino...). For example spiral galaxies differential rotation just couldnt be the way it is with the visible matter. There HAS to be something else. Or lots of cosmologic stuff that nobody really understands:)
About detection: Machos have been detected (there was a slashdot story a while back). Prime candidate for detection is gravitational microlensing. About wimps... i personally like the philosophical concept, but dont have any idea how you could detect them if they are really not interacting exept with gravity. Maybe if we could meassure gravity waves, there could be dispersions caused by them in otherwise matterfree space, but we cant even detect those at all...
hm. the recievers yes, IIRC. But im not so sure about the transmission line. But of course the idea of really LARGE scale hadnt been in my mind, i thought more like point to point transmission... I think it would depend on the scale of the system, plus on the properties of the space between sender/emitter...
What has range of cell phones to do with power transmission efficiency? The reason the star wars programm never worked was because they tried to hit very fast moving small targets that were potentially ANTI-reflective coated plus rotating...
The optical window of the athmosphere is quite good in the visible till near IR lenght. From orbit to ground less then 10% loss when no clouds/ect and no glancing angle.
Also with microwaves, the total transmission efficiency would be lower because of divergence losses.
I guess the "multitasking" is the reason why the damn fucking "c u l8r" speak has evolved. Everybody who types a lot can typ just as fast as a normal communication requires. So i never found the need for abriviations. But it seems that i dont use icq or irc "seriously" enough, because i discovered only having 1 conversation at a time is nonl33t. Talking to 15 people at once results in that special style of writing and the lim(iq->0) feel usually encountered on the web. Because the fast writing only removes one bottleneck....
Today, good ir lasers can get 60% wallplug efficiency (>99% quantum efficency and little outcoupling losses, plus little additional resistances adding to the bandgap). The main reason why solar cells are unefficient is that you have to gamble with the bandgap: set it too high, and you will lose to many low energy photons. set it too low, and all those high energy photons will lose all energy >E_gap as phonons/heat. So even an absolutely ideal Solar cell could only get a little over 25% or so efficiency with a backbody spectrum.
But now take a laser and create a optimally tuned solar cell with a bandgap just a bit lower than the laser wavelenght. You should be able to get 20-30% total transmission efficiency at least, imho, after a little optimisation. That doesnt sound too good, but its not so bad compared to other ways to store and carry energy (batteries, ect).
But of course, having solar power stations in orbit that beam down their power with lasers would make a lot of people very nervous, for very good reasons...
hoho. I cant imagine the duel use of a credit card cd. Maybe as throwing star if you sharpen the edges?
But: you know that there is only 30 or 40 mb of usable space on a credit card cd. You want a bootable linux, plus a gui, plus all the drivers to get you connectivity... not easily done.
Plus credit card cds arent liked very much by slot in cdroms, if they are actually USED like a credit card (put in the purse), they wont work when you need them.
7 is much faster then 6, and at least I didnt notice any toolsbars/ect after installing, but otoh, i dont click on every "l337 xtras here" checkboxs in setup programs.
yo. I can see it. The next story about a new cpu relase will have the discription "They created a machine that can calculate things, and this one is different from the ones before" Come on. This is news for nerds, not news for joe sixpack.
no slashdot story summery with an idiodic comment. YES, IT WAS PROGRESS. And yes, its nice to have icons, even if you, mr submitter, probably still think that anything thats not a cli is bad.
Do you really think, even for a moment, that at ANY point of time in this or the last century "the people" whould have had ANY chance against the police force and the army?
You know, atomic bombs have never been used by civilians for any crimes, so lets put the plutonium in th shelf at walmart. Because its stupid banning something that never has hurt anyone, yes?
looking out at the stars at night, or using a microscope, will result in an equal amount of religious disturbance for that group of people if they use their brains to think about what they see.
So i recommnd preventive suicide, it also helps them get close to their god. Thanks for leaving us alone, guys, just do it!
I dont agree. Audiobooks, especially those "aimed at geeks" he wants, require thinking about what is told following the sentences, story, ect. Radio is just background noise. And cell phone calls are more distracting, yes, but they usually dont last hours every day, and damage=risk*time of exposure.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with nexus was not the difficulty (although that was a issue, too), but
the user interface (the first game i couldnt even move a ship without reading the manual. And that went on into the details. Very non-intuitive all the way)
the non-existing feedback in many situations ("why the fuck does that damn ship turn now?" "why doesnt anything happen?")
and the weapon balancing... sure mass drivers shouldnt work well against shielded target or so, but it was really boring to wait 20 minutes until you finally nibbled a single ship to death if you didnt have the ideal loadout. And i consider "knowing what enemies will be there because i played it 5 times already" a cheat, and not a strategy that should be needed in each mission. A balanced loadout should leave a chance to win)
You know what statisics are? Even if the mtbf is 1billion years, if there are a billion media in use, one poor fellow will be fucked up in the first one.
Its not like there is that mystical data after which all media fail....
you need more power to kill a bit (like in creating a electron/hole cascade or flipping a magnetic domain via particle interaction) than to fuck up a part of our dna.
If there is an gammaray burst or a supernova near enough to get the bits behind the metal of their enclosured/concrete of the houses,ect, we dont need to worry about data...
about the firefox thing: Its in bugzilla since 2001 or so.
Generall consense of the developers:the codebase is so fucked up they dont know how to fix it, so they ignore it.
Yes it is.
25GB/s für 176 GFlops.
An A64 or P4 has 6GB for 4-6Gflops.
If you do streaming MACS, you would need 2 loads and 1 store per 2 instructions-> 12byte per flop->176Gflops need 2Tbyte/s. Hope you get good cache hit rate.
Just as an example: REAL vector computers can sustain their vector units from main memory.
Well, i have a bigger problem with the fact that THE top-of-the-line spacecraft of humanity will be scrapped after a mere decade... sure it might not be cutting edge anymore, but theres place for more than one ship in a starfleet...
Wouldnt make her webpage load loads of 30-40kbyte jpegs and scale them down dynamically to 20*20 pixel thumbnails. At least not 15 per page...
Well, too be fair, cell uses some fairly stoned tricks to get to that kind of peak power. (the massive memory bandwith is only to small local memories (everywhere else you would call them cache) and the main memory bandwith is laughable compared to the computing resources.
Although linpack is very nice to parallize, i dont think it would be possible to even get 10% of the theoretical rate on a cell.
Well, im not really up to date, but there are 2 canditates for dark matter:
:)
Machos (massive compact halo objects) and Wimps (weakly interacting massive particles).
The latter are suppossed to be particles not being affected by any force but gravity (just like neutrinos are not affected by strong force or electromagnetic forces). Creation could have happened during the big band (those mysterious first 3 minutes).
Machos OTOH would be normal matter, but "dark" in the sense of "no active emission". What you would normally expect from the name. Could be cold dust nebula, primordial black holes, all that stuff.
Dark matter is suspected because it HAS to be there in order for the physical rules to work (if you think that kind of reasoning is invalid, well, it served us well with the neutrino...). For example spiral galaxies differential rotation just couldnt be the way it is with the visible matter. There HAS to be something else. Or lots of cosmologic stuff that nobody really understands
About detection: Machos have been detected (there was a slashdot story a while back). Prime candidate for detection is gravitational microlensing.
About wimps... i personally like the philosophical concept, but dont have any idea how you could detect them if they are really not interacting exept with gravity. Maybe if we could meassure gravity waves, there could be dispersions caused by them in otherwise matterfree space, but we cant even detect those at all...
hm. the recievers yes, IIRC.
But im not so sure about the transmission line. But of course the idea of really LARGE scale hadnt been in my mind, i thought more like point to point transmission...
I think it would depend on the scale of the system, plus on the properties of the space between sender/emitter...
What has range of cell phones to do with power transmission efficiency?
The reason the star wars programm never worked was because they tried to hit very fast moving small targets that were potentially ANTI-reflective coated plus rotating...
The optical window of the athmosphere is quite good in the visible till near IR lenght. From orbit to ground less then 10% loss when no clouds/ect and no glancing angle.
Also with microwaves, the total transmission efficiency would be lower because of divergence losses.
I guess the "multitasking" is the reason why the damn fucking "c u l8r" speak has evolved.
Everybody who types a lot can typ just as fast as a normal communication requires. So i never found the need for abriviations.
But it seems that i dont use icq or irc "seriously" enough, because i discovered only having 1 conversation at a time is nonl33t. Talking to 15 people at once results in that special style of writing and the lim(iq->0) feel usually encountered on the web. Because the fast writing only removes one bottleneck....
its no more antigravity than a blimp.
Yes, but not set up as an experimental stage, but as a power plant.
thus not compareable to the article toy.
Only the first part. The last is most likely about using space solar satellites for earth electricity generation.
Today, good ir lasers can get 60% wallplug efficiency (>99% quantum efficency and little outcoupling losses, plus little additional resistances adding to the bandgap).
...
The main reason why solar cells are unefficient is that you have to gamble with the bandgap: set it too high, and you will lose to many low energy photons. set it too low, and all those high energy photons will lose all energy >E_gap as phonons/heat. So even an absolutely ideal Solar cell could only get a little over 25% or so efficiency with a backbody spectrum.
But now take a laser and create a optimally tuned solar cell with a bandgap just a bit lower than the laser wavelenght. You should be able to get 20-30% total transmission efficiency at least, imho, after a little optimisation.
That doesnt sound too good, but its not so bad compared to other ways to store and carry energy (batteries, ect).
But of course, having solar power stations in orbit that beam down their power with lasers would make a lot of people very nervous, for very good reasons
hoho.
I cant imagine the duel use of a credit card cd. Maybe as throwing star if you sharpen the edges?
But: you know that there is only 30 or 40 mb of usable space on a credit card cd. You want a bootable linux, plus a gui, plus all the drivers to get you connectivity... not easily done.
Plus credit card cds arent liked very much by slot in cdroms, if they are actually USED like a credit card (put in the purse), they wont work when you need them.
7 is much faster then 6, and at least I didnt notice any toolsbars/ect after installing, but otoh, i dont click on every "l337 xtras here" checkboxs in setup programs.
yo. I can see it. The next story about a new cpu relase will have the discription "They created a machine that can calculate things, and this one is different from the ones before"
Come on. This is news for nerds, not news for joe sixpack.
come on... such a nice bow and shield directly next to the stairs, you have to be cheating :)
no slashdot story summery with an idiodic comment.
YES, IT WAS PROGRESS.
And yes, its nice to have icons, even if you, mr submitter, probably still think that anything thats not a cli is bad.
Do you really think, even for a moment, that at ANY point of time in this or the last century "the people" whould have had ANY chance against the police force and the army?
You know, atomic bombs have never been used by civilians for any crimes, so lets put the plutonium in th shelf at walmart.
Because its stupid banning something that never has hurt anyone, yes?
looking out at the stars at night, or using a microscope, will result in an equal amount of religious disturbance for that group of people if they use their brains to think about what they see.
So i recommnd preventive suicide, it also helps them get close to their god.
Thanks for leaving us alone, guys, just do it!
I dont agree.
Audiobooks, especially those "aimed at geeks" he wants, require thinking about what is told following the sentences, story, ect.
Radio is just background noise.
And cell phone calls are more distracting, yes, but they usually dont last hours every day, and damage=risk*time of exposure.