Predicting that/. will soon have a story about faster CPUs and another one on how a popular DRM system can be broken takes a lot of work. I have no time left to look for work.
...I'm listing some of the upcoming stories in advance here:
Microsoft will be developing Office for Mac on Intel
Blizzard will be developing games for Mac on Intel
Intel will start developing compilers for Mac on Intel
gcc will continue to be developed for Mac on Intel
Some current game developers who don't develop Mac games will now develop games for Mac on Intel
Some current application developers who don't develop Mac games will now develop application for Mac on Intel
Some PowerPC based software will no longer be developed for Mac on Intel
Virtual machines allowing you to run Windows will be developed for Mac on Intel
Some companies who currently don't develop device drivers for Macs will now develop them for Mac on Intel
Some open source projects will now be developed for Mac on Intel
Some open source projects currently being developed for Mac on PowerPC will no longer be developed for Mac on Intel
Some company, probably in the Far East, will develop hard drives that store more data than current hard drives.
I'm thinking of maybe getting a job as a pundit so I can get paid for this and have people respect me as an expert. Any suggestions where I should send my resume?
Space technology is behind because of wars? I think you're confused. The rockets we see see today are the direct descendants of rockets like the V2. The moon landings were a direct result of competition between the US and the USSR during the cold war - that's why they're no longer happening. The space race is beginning to warm up again because countries like China are threating American military superiority in space.
I am yet to see a description of a quantum computer that isn't plagued by decoherence problems. Basically, if you perturb a quantum computer by a small amount, e, then the wave function will diverge away from the idea state by exp(ket) for some constant k. So basically quantum computers will very rapidly start producing garbage. There are countless papers describing error correction but all this does is replace exp(ket) by exp(k'et) where k' is a bit smaller than k. Tthat exponential will still rapidly swallow the correction and give you decoherence before you can actually run anything. Some papers claim to get k right down to zero. But whenever you look you find they always make some assumtion about the system (ie. about various off diagonal terms in the Hamiltonian, the bits that give rise to these exponentials) and relaxing those assumptions ever so slightly (as is inevitable in the real world) brings back the exponential decay into decoherence.
One or two bit at a time quantum computers - sure, we can build those. My hunch, however, is that to build an N bit quantum computer is exp(N) hard. I expect we will eventually have non-trivial quantum computers, but unfortunately the amount of effort to make them will be as much as the effort to build a classical machine that can simulate them. This isn't just nay-saying, unlike the claims that driving at over 30mph would kill humans, my claims are backed up by many physicists, in particular those that don't have a financial interest in quantum computers.
On the other hand, quantum computer science is very interesting as a branch of mathematics and Shor's algorithm for factoring, for example, is a thing of beauty. So I don't blame people bluffing in order to get grant money. And I suppose I don't really hold it against researchers trying to get money out of venture capitalists this way either. Just as long as that money isn't coming out of any funds I'm investing in...
Funding research for you to exploit isn't "doing good". It's just a matter of "doing business"
Maybe you missed economics 101. The whole point of capitalism is to rig a society so that in order to make money you need to do something that other people want in order to convince them to pay you. So there's absolutely no incompatibility between "doing good" and "doing business". Pharmaceutical companies need to do decades of expensive research to find good drugs. Record companies just need a recording studio.
Well **** me! I was going to call your bluff on the van der Waals force being related to the Casimir force but wisely I did a bit of web searching first and found that they are related and that this has been known since 1955. On the one hand I've studied quantum field theory and read papers on the Casimir force, and on the other hand I've worked with computational chemists who put the vdW force into their models all the time. But I had no clue these things were related. I had merely assumed that the vdW force was simply what you got when you summed together a few electrostatic potentials for the kinds of dipoles you might expect to find in atoms. Is there a good source to read up on this? (Go easy, it's years since I actually did any physical calculations.)
Sometimes science can get a little too compartmentalized. the vdW force is more in the domain of chemists than of physicists so physicists don't get taught it.
Despite variousattempts I am unable to ascertain the meaning of "SOL" with any degree of definiteness. My best guess is shit out of luck. Would that be correct? Of course, that doesn't really help because as far as I'm concerned a "replicator" is something used to make cups of Earl Grey tea on Star Trek.
I'm out of touch! However, I think I know what SG1 means as a friend of mine worked on the original movie (did the digital effects for the cool opening and closing masks).
...say a trip to Yosemite, then you might, if you're lucky, see a bear and learn that it looks like a big brown shaggy lump.
On the other hand you can go online and see countless pictures of bears, read about bear behavior, study the laters papers on bear biochemistry (the biochemistry of hibernation is fascinating) and so on. Just seeing an animal from a distance is a poor substitute for the real thing: knowing and understanding bear biology. Even watching a program about bears on the Discovery Channel will give you as much insight about bears as watching real bears close up for months. (Of course it does, Discovery Program channels are the fruit of someone else's years of observation distilled down into 60 minutes of television.)
Star Trek -> Next Gen -> DS9 -> Voyager -> Enterprise
I see a clear trend. As we move from one to the next we see more and more fantastic elements removed. I only watched half a dozen or so episodes of Enterprise but there was barely a hint of Science Fiction, most of the stories I saw might have been set during WWII or some other historical setting. Meanwhile in Star Trek we had single celled organisms the size of a planet, super powerful gods from Greek mythology, alien planets where the entire population were gangsters, numerous aliens who could destory the Enterprise with a blink of the eye and so on. Nowawdays scriptwriters aren't allowed to use their imagination. Any Science Fiction series has to be ER, or a crime series or a western in space.
...has been caused by these people who think that Science Fiction and a Physics textbook should be much the same thing. It's been an ongoing problem. Years back people like Asimov basically enforced rules in the magazine over which they were influential stating what the laws of physics had to be in anything they published. The same has happened in TV science fiction. It's reached the point where you can have a series like Firefly which has been so denuded of Science Fiction that it doesn't have aliens and the characters use regular firearms.
The whole point of Science Fiction is to be speculative. The question to ask is "what happens if I change the rules?" not "what can I do within these rules?"
Although I have now reached adulthood I still need people to tell me what to do as I haven't developed any kind of values for myself that would allow me to decide for myself whether one course of action is better than another. From reading the posts I've seen on Slashdot I've decided that the readers are a very intelligent collection of people who could function as a surrogate mother to tell me what to do. Anyway, it's not like the one life I have is precious or anything, so why should I spend any time thinking about what to do with it when I can get others to do that for me. So please, Slashdot readers, what should I do with my life?
Red Mars was probably the most intensely boring book I have ever read in my life. If there's a book called something like "Dust and Soil of the Roadsides of Northwestern Arkansas" then it might just be more boring than this book, but I doubt it.
You might then ask why I actually read it. I was suffering from bad insomnia at the time (went for 4 or 5 months with only a couple of hours each night...) and the drugs weren't working too well. You probably think I'm making this up. I'm actually 100% serious.
Father's Day was inconsistent with Dr Who. But that's fine, it wasn't a hard SF story but an interesting what-if about the reactions of people in a bizarre situation, and that trumps consistency. You know what Emerson had to say on the subject of consistency...
Actually, I think consistency may be causing a bit of a demise of science fiction. The most consistent science fiction series I've seen yet is Firefly - but it's not science fiction, it's a western. Gone are the leaps of imagination and flights of fancy and instead we have something incredibly straitjacketed by 'realism'. I did enjoy Firefly a lot, but it wasn't mind expanding like good SF ought to be. Even the trashiest episodes of the original Star Trek series made people wonder about the possibilities of an unexplored universe. In Firefly the universe is just more of what's here.
As for "Bad Wolf", it simply hasn't been explained yet. Many people seem to think that because #12 was called "Bad Wolf" it must have had the explanation. Have patience - all will be revealed in #13 (I hope)!
Re:I just want to say...
on
Dr Who Rolls On
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Weakest isn't the right word. I think the second one was the weakest - too much of a HitchHiker wannabe episode. The first episode was just a get-to-know-the-characters story and I quite enjoyed it for what it was. But Dalek was just plain wrong. Reminds me of the way Star Trek invented the awesome Borg and then completely ruined them by giving them a centralized human face in the form of the Borg Queen (who must have been the inspiration The Controller in Bad Wolf). Neither The Borg, nor the Daleks, are human (in the broader sense that includes Galifreyans), and I wish scriptwriters would remember that.
Dalek should have been a tense episode where The Doctor and the Dalek pit their wits against each other for 45 minutes in an attempt to eliminate each other with the audience wondering how each character will avoid the next trap set for them by their opponent. Or at least that's how I would have written it. Above all, no schmalz.
Both parts of The Empty Child will surely be considered among the best episodes of Dr Who ever. I'm sure young kids watching it would have been wetting themselves with fear.
But after a great start I think Daleks was the weakest or second weakest episode this season. I was hoping for schlock, but instead got schmalz.
Calling me a fattist is like calling someone who complains that they've just been drenched with a bucket of blood accidentally spilled from the upper storeys of an abbatoir a "fucking hippy vegertarian".
I just want to say...
on
Dr Who Rolls On
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· Score: 4, Informative
...the series so far has been truly awesome. I'm watching AVIs in the US that I download from a Tivo in the UK each week. I feel like I ought to be paying the BBC money to encourage them to keep up the good work - but I guess I'll just buy the boxed set when it's released.
The whole Bad Wolf thing has been particularly entertaining. They're even making comparisons to Pynchon in the UK.
Beg, buy, borrow or steal it. Whatever, just make sure you watch it!
Slashdot Mirror
Predicting that /. will soon have a story about faster CPUs and another one on how a popular DRM system can be broken takes a lot of work. I have no time left to look for work.
I'm thinking of maybe getting a job as a pundit so I can get paid for this and have people respect me as an expert. Any suggestions where I should send my resume?
Space technology is behind because of wars? I think you're confused. The rockets we see see today are the direct descendants of rockets like the V2. The moon landings were a direct result of competition between the US and the USSR during the cold war - that's why they're no longer happening. The space race is beginning to warm up again because countries like China are threating American military superiority in space.
One or two bit at a time quantum computers - sure, we can build those. My hunch, however, is that to build an N bit quantum computer is exp(N) hard. I expect we will eventually have non-trivial quantum computers, but unfortunately the amount of effort to make them will be as much as the effort to build a classical machine that can simulate them. This isn't just nay-saying, unlike the claims that driving at over 30mph would kill humans, my claims are backed up by many physicists, in particular those that don't have a financial interest in quantum computers.
On the other hand, quantum computer science is very interesting as a branch of mathematics and Shor's algorithm for factoring, for example, is a thing of beauty. So I don't blame people bluffing in order to get grant money. And I suppose I don't really hold it against researchers trying to get money out of venture capitalists this way either. Just as long as that money isn't coming out of any funds I'm investing in...
I'm not going to die.
Rithmomachia of course!
Sometimes science can get a little too compartmentalized. the vdW force is more in the domain of chemists than of physicists so physicists don't get taught it.
I'm out of touch! However, I think I know what SG1 means as a friend of mine worked on the original movie (did the digital effects for the cool opening and closing masks).
On the other hand you can go online and see countless pictures of bears, read about bear behavior, study the laters papers on bear biochemistry (the biochemistry of hibernation is fascinating) and so on. Just seeing an animal from a distance is a poor substitute for the real thing: knowing and understanding bear biology. Even watching a program about bears on the Discovery Channel will give you as much insight about bears as watching real bears close up for months. (Of course it does, Discovery Program channels are the fruit of someone else's years of observation distilled down into 60 minutes of television.)
I see a clear trend. As we move from one to the next we see more and more fantastic elements removed. I only watched half a dozen or so episodes of Enterprise but there was barely a hint of Science Fiction, most of the stories I saw might have been set during WWII or some other historical setting. Meanwhile in Star Trek we had single celled organisms the size of a planet, super powerful gods from Greek mythology, alien planets where the entire population were gangsters, numerous aliens who could destory the Enterprise with a blink of the eye and so on. Nowawdays scriptwriters aren't allowed to use their imagination. Any Science Fiction series has to be ER, or a crime series or a western in space.
The whole point of Science Fiction is to be speculative. The question to ask is "what happens if I change the rules?" not "what can I do within these rules?"
...this.
Although I have now reached adulthood I still need people to tell me what to do as I haven't developed any kind of values for myself that would allow me to decide for myself whether one course of action is better than another. From reading the posts I've seen on Slashdot I've decided that the readers are a very intelligent collection of people who could function as a surrogate mother to tell me what to do. Anyway, it's not like the one life I have is precious or anything, so why should I spend any time thinking about what to do with it when I can get others to do that for me. So please, Slashdot readers, what should I do with my life?
If I see the word regolith again I think I might just scream :-)
You might then ask why I actually read it. I was suffering from bad insomnia at the time (went for 4 or 5 months with only a couple of hours each night...) and the drugs weren't working too well. You probably think I'm making this up. I'm actually 100% serious.
Actually, I think consistency may be causing a bit of a demise of science fiction. The most consistent science fiction series I've seen yet is Firefly - but it's not science fiction, it's a western. Gone are the leaps of imagination and flights of fancy and instead we have something incredibly straitjacketed by 'realism'. I did enjoy Firefly a lot, but it wasn't mind expanding like good SF ought to be. Even the trashiest episodes of the original Star Trek series made people wonder about the possibilities of an unexplored universe. In Firefly the universe is just more of what's here.
As for "Bad Wolf", it simply hasn't been explained yet. Many people seem to think that because #12 was called "Bad Wolf" it must have had the explanation. Have patience - all will be revealed in #13 (I hope)!
Dalek should have been a tense episode where The Doctor and the Dalek pit their wits against each other for 45 minutes in an attempt to eliminate each other with the audience wondering how each character will avoid the next trap set for them by their opponent. Or at least that's how I would have written it. Above all, no schmalz.
I'm sure there will come a day when you regret that.
So now I'm confused by the golfing web site I linked to...
But after a great start I think Daleks was the weakest or second weakest episode this season. I was hoping for schlock, but instead got schmalz.
Calling me a fattist is like calling someone who complains that they've just been drenched with a bucket of blood accidentally spilled from the upper storeys of an abbatoir a "fucking hippy vegertarian".
The whole Bad Wolf thing has been particularly entertaining. They're even making comparisons to Pynchon in the UK.
Beg, buy, borrow or steal it. Whatever, just make sure you watch it!
It's all in the title. This bit is just to stop /. making some stupid comment about cats and tongues.