Besides vi and Emacs, who else remembers Wordperfect, Wordstar, etc. The good old days when you do everything with a keyboard, and keyboard commands. There's a menu bar that you can call up and out comes the menus. You can also memorise the good ol' keyboard commands, and save loads of time. And of course, you don't waste time rendering the page nicely. That happens when you print out.:)
Well, those days are gone... and this "new" interface is nostalgically reminding me of those days. IMO, it's a fantastic idea!
Agreed totally. I was fooled for a while, until I saw the tag.
But it's an intriguing idea. Imagine giving your friend a punch until he picks up the phone...
There may be no immediate application, but who cares? It's a cool application. Moreover, the computation approach they developed for this may have other applications that may turn out to be more more useful than originally conceived. It's research for the sake of research:)
I agree totally. Much as we geeks have complete faith in OO and would love to see everyone else switch, people DO NOT want to switch. And there really are some features in MS Office still lacking in OO. Such as some of the chart plotting features.
I may be missing something here. But isn't this just like the security guard pressing a button when he sees something suspicious? Except you don't have to press a button here.
If you want to program for web, learn about HTML, PHP, CGI scripting, etc. If you want to write applications, learn a procedural language C, C++, even Pascal, and read up on how the hardware works (e.g. what is a register, how pointers work, etc.). There is no best way. But take the time to learn some of the fundamentals. Data structures, common algorithms, etc. Even if you don't end up using most of them, they'll help you structure your thinking. And ultimately, the choice or programming languages or programming model does not matter. It's how you think of the problem, and how you go about solving it.
High prices = excuse for people to turn to free (as in beer) software. Of course, to avoid getting BSA in your house and suing you into bankruptcy, FOSS software is recommended, esp. if you're running a business.
I see a lot of people lamenting how the automation from Windows has made things easy enough that people don't know what is going on behind the scene. I think the problem is not with too much automation. It is with NOT ENOUGH automation. It's like MS tried to hide the details from people, but they didn't go far enough to give people an alternative way to view working with the computer. So we ended up with a system where people seem to have the details hidden, but they often still need to see those details, and they find it harder to access them than before. Agreed, it's a very hard problem, one that is not being solved even now, but after all these years, there is still no resolution in sight.
The rule of thumb: If you want something, do it yourself. If you consider it important that the bug-fixes are compiled into a binary form and released regularly, even though the code is in alpha quality, do it yourself. It is not the responsibility of code developers to produce the binary for end users, at least not in alpha quality. The resulting feedback from whining end users are usually just noise, as the code has not been thoroughly tested, and there's a good chance the binary code WILL NOT WORK on the user's machine. That's through no fault of the developer. The user has to take the initiative to update the 50 other libraries that source was compiled against.
Anyway, because I didn't have the time to spare the compile alpha releases anymore, I decided to move from Linux to OS X, and have a stable platform to work on, and have other people figure out the compiling and software upgrades for me.
So you're suggesting that the answer to BS folding is to decentralise the whole system and have a totally decentralised system of maintaining the sites to anti-spam? Well, anyone out there willing to donate resources (coding time, servers, etc.) to do this?
I just find it sad that we're reduced to resorting to self policing to protect ourselves in this internet era. It's like the mafia has become so powerful that the police are not able to do anything to them.
I used LaTeX for my thesis, and with the page count approaching 150, it's probably about as thick as quite a number of books, and I didn't have much problems with it.
That said, I wasn't too particular about where my graphics ended up, in the true spirit of separation of content and layout. But if you're a publisher, doing layout on TeX will probably be a major pain in the ass, if not impossible to do (at least as far as I know). If you're doing mostly text, LaTeX should do the job wonderfully.
Frankly, I think the real problem lies in the fact that the standard OS nowadays (Windows) does not come with a readily accessible programming language. Back in the good ol' days, there was GW-BASIC and (later) Q-Basic. Qbasic even came with some games (remember gorilla?), that you could look at and see how things are done. All that made for a low technical barrier to entry (but not for good programming style). Now, unless you've got an inclination for programming, there's no way you can get started easily.
The problem with recompiling the kernel is that there are too many options there. Unless a different interface is implemented soon for kernel recompiling, or for adding new drivers, the uninitiated may be too scared to even consider recompiling, for fear of breaking something.
True, the article is partly an april fool's joke. What would you get by optimizing the idle loop? More cycles of the idle loop running in your idle time!
But the 2nd half of the article discusses Altivec instructions. And seriously, there's useful information to be found there if you're writing Altivec code.
The idea seems simple enough. Create a hierarchical inference structure. Train it on some data. Let the nodes learn what are the most frequent data. This forms the basic alphabet set. Propagate this up the hierachy. Learn the conditional probability distribution. Voila, you have a working visual recognition system.
Problem is, the system will be slow, unless you have a processor capable of parallel or vector processing. Try implementing the system on Matlab with a 320x200 image, and see your processor crawl to a halt. Now, imagine doing this on a 320x200 video, and pray! Well, that's why we need a different processor architecture to make this work. But the theory is simple.
I think you're missing the point. The article is talking about AUTISTIC SAVANTISM. First and foremost, this guy is autistic, which, we all agree, is a disability. The fact that he's also savant, and so many other autistic people are also savant, may mean that the 2 are linked. Maybe the brain is screwed in some ways, and he provides a way to see how that may be the case because he can describe how he does the things he does. That is the point of the article. Period.
My view of the Cell chip is that it's actually 2 different kinds of chips put together. It has a general processor (the POWER5 core) core, and essentially co-processors that are optimized for a totally different class of programs. The POWER5 chip would let it run your normal office applications, but the SPEs allow the chip to do things like graphics processing, audio processing, simulations, etc. All those problems that lend themselves naturally to a vectorizes solution. Together, the 2 kinds of cores on a single chip has the potential to do a lot. But there has to be tools to allow developers to make use of the potential. Especially as vectorized programs are not easy to write and optimize, that makes the quality of the development tools very important in deciding the success of the chip.
Embedded electronics is the next big thing, but I don't see MS on this platform taking off in a big way. CE just don't cut it in terms of efficiency, and when doing embedded software, efficiency is king. Remember, you've got much less power on your device, but you still have to achieve similar things to when you were programming on the PC. Come to think of it, it's a little like programming for the 286s.
I see here a naive kid who just did something to satisfy his ego. Maybe just being eager to share the good stuff, because he loved the company. Well, turns out that he violated some NDA which he didn't read. And the company decides that it has to make a point.
Moral of the story? Read the NDA, know what you can and cannot do. The company will not be lenient, because it's protecting its own interest. On the other hand, maybe it doesn't have to terrify the kids so much. They're just some poor kids anyway. A warning would do just fine, and they will probably remain loyal customers. Do they really need to resort to suing the guys? I think not.
Very insightful comment. In addition, I agree with the observation that if mass blocks gravity, we should see at least some variation in gravity between night and day, which we do not see now. Moreover, the paper does not describe the exact conditions in which the experiements are performed. We do not know whether the experiments are performed indoors or outdoors, what are the efforts, if any, to cancel out all other possible effects so that we know for sure that it is the eclipse causing the apparent anomality in the data. In short, we can't come to any conclusions with these experiments. At most, they can only tell us that there is something we missed. But not what. And it is in any case, too early to throw relativity out of the window.
Give me 10 gig of space, and I may consider keeping all my mails in some kind of archive. Heck, give me 50 rooms, and I may print out all the emails, together with whatever attachments that come out, file them, and store the files somewhere. Of course, we'll probably kill many many trees somewhere along the way, but it's all for the sake of keeping our records properly.
Actually, there are already methods available to figure out what the chip does currently. I have heard of one that tries to measure the power usage, at each fetch-execute cycle, and based on that, can figure out what kind of instructions have been run. The CPU already gives out EM radiation which can be detected. It may be just a matter of figuring out what kind of signal is radiated when each instruction is being executed to know what instructions are being run. So the same security concerns already exist today.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides vi and Emacs, who else remembers Wordperfect, Wordstar, etc. The good old days when you do everything with a keyboard, and keyboard commands. There's a menu bar that you can call up and out comes the menus. You can also memorise the good ol' keyboard commands, and save loads of time. And of course, you don't waste time rendering the page nicely. That happens when you print out. :)
Well, those days are gone... and this "new" interface is nostalgically reminding me of those days. IMO, it's a fantastic idea!
Agreed totally. I was fooled for a while, until I saw the tag. But it's an intriguing idea. Imagine giving your friend a punch until he picks up the phone...
My laptop drinks Coke!
If they were to claim to be producing free energy, it would appear that they were claiming that they're violating energy conservation.
There may be no immediate application, but who cares? It's a cool application. Moreover, the computation approach they developed for this may have other applications that may turn out to be more more useful than originally conceived. It's research for the sake of research :)
I agree totally. Much as we geeks have complete faith in OO and would love to see everyone else switch, people DO NOT want to switch. And there really are some features in MS Office still lacking in OO. Such as some of the chart plotting features.
I may be missing something here. But isn't this just like the security guard pressing a button when he sees something suspicious? Except you don't have to press a button here.
If you want to program for web, learn about HTML, PHP, CGI scripting, etc. If you want to write applications, learn a procedural language C, C++, even Pascal, and read up on how the hardware works (e.g. what is a register, how pointers work, etc.). There is no best way. But take the time to learn some of the fundamentals. Data structures, common algorithms, etc. Even if you don't end up using most of them, they'll help you structure your thinking. And ultimately, the choice or programming languages or programming model does not matter. It's how you think of the problem, and how you go about solving it.
High prices = excuse for people to turn to free (as in beer) software. Of course, to avoid getting BSA in your house and suing you into bankruptcy, FOSS software is recommended, esp. if you're running a business.
I see a lot of people lamenting how the automation from Windows has made things easy enough that people don't know what is going on behind the scene. I think the problem is not with too much automation. It is with NOT ENOUGH automation. It's like MS tried to hide the details from people, but they didn't go far enough to give people an alternative way to view working with the computer. So we ended up with a system where people seem to have the details hidden, but they often still need to see those details, and they find it harder to access them than before. Agreed, it's a very hard problem, one that is not being solved even now, but after all these years, there is still no resolution in sight.
Anyway, because I didn't have the time to spare the compile alpha releases anymore, I decided to move from Linux to OS X, and have a stable platform to work on, and have other people figure out the compiling and software upgrades for me.
I just find it sad that we're reduced to resorting to self policing to protect ourselves in this internet era. It's like the mafia has become so powerful that the police are not able to do anything to them.
I used LaTeX for my thesis, and with the page count approaching 150, it's probably about as thick as quite a number of books, and I didn't have much problems with it. That said, I wasn't too particular about where my graphics ended up, in the true spirit of separation of content and layout. But if you're a publisher, doing layout on TeX will probably be a major pain in the ass, if not impossible to do (at least as far as I know). If you're doing mostly text, LaTeX should do the job wonderfully.
Frankly, I think the real problem lies in the fact that the standard OS nowadays (Windows) does not come with a readily accessible programming language. Back in the good ol' days, there was GW-BASIC and (later) Q-Basic. Qbasic even came with some games (remember gorilla?), that you could look at and see how things are done. All that made for a low technical barrier to entry (but not for good programming style). Now, unless you've got an inclination for programming, there's no way you can get started easily.
It seems to me that saying 5mg of morphine alone has less effect then 5mg combined of morphine and ibuprofen is not stating the obvious.
The problem with recompiling the kernel is that there are too many options there. Unless a different interface is implemented soon for kernel recompiling, or for adding new drivers, the uninitiated may be too scared to even consider recompiling, for fear of breaking something.
True, the article is partly an april fool's joke. What would you get by optimizing the idle loop? More cycles of the idle loop running in your idle time! But the 2nd half of the article discusses Altivec instructions. And seriously, there's useful information to be found there if you're writing Altivec code.
The idea seems simple enough. Create a hierarchical inference structure. Train it on some data. Let the nodes learn what are the most frequent data. This forms the basic alphabet set. Propagate this up the hierachy. Learn the conditional probability distribution. Voila, you have a working visual recognition system. Problem is, the system will be slow, unless you have a processor capable of parallel or vector processing. Try implementing the system on Matlab with a 320x200 image, and see your processor crawl to a halt. Now, imagine doing this on a 320x200 video, and pray! Well, that's why we need a different processor architecture to make this work. But the theory is simple.
I think you're missing the point. The article is talking about AUTISTIC SAVANTISM. First and foremost, this guy is autistic, which, we all agree, is a disability. The fact that he's also savant, and so many other autistic people are also savant, may mean that the 2 are linked. Maybe the brain is screwed in some ways, and he provides a way to see how that may be the case because he can describe how he does the things he does. That is the point of the article. Period.
My view of the Cell chip is that it's actually 2 different kinds of chips put together. It has a general processor (the POWER5 core) core, and essentially co-processors that are optimized for a totally different class of programs. The POWER5 chip would let it run your normal office applications, but the SPEs allow the chip to do things like graphics processing, audio processing, simulations, etc. All those problems that lend themselves naturally to a vectorizes solution. Together, the 2 kinds of cores on a single chip has the potential to do a lot. But there has to be tools to allow developers to make use of the potential. Especially as vectorized programs are not easy to write and optimize, that makes the quality of the development tools very important in deciding the success of the chip.
Embedded electronics is the next big thing, but I don't see MS on this platform taking off in a big way. CE just don't cut it in terms of efficiency, and when doing embedded software, efficiency is king. Remember, you've got much less power on your device, but you still have to achieve similar things to when you were programming on the PC. Come to think of it, it's a little like programming for the 286s.
I see here a naive kid who just did something to satisfy his ego. Maybe just being eager to share the good stuff, because he loved the company. Well, turns out that he violated some NDA which he didn't read. And the company decides that it has to make a point. Moral of the story? Read the NDA, know what you can and cannot do. The company will not be lenient, because it's protecting its own interest. On the other hand, maybe it doesn't have to terrify the kids so much. They're just some poor kids anyway. A warning would do just fine, and they will probably remain loyal customers. Do they really need to resort to suing the guys? I think not.
Very insightful comment. In addition, I agree with the observation that if mass blocks gravity, we should see at least some variation in gravity between night and day, which we do not see now. Moreover, the paper does not describe the exact conditions in which the experiements are performed. We do not know whether the experiments are performed indoors or outdoors, what are the efforts, if any, to cancel out all other possible effects so that we know for sure that it is the eclipse causing the apparent anomality in the data. In short, we can't come to any conclusions with these experiments. At most, they can only tell us that there is something we missed. But not what. And it is in any case, too early to throw relativity out of the window.
Give me 10 gig of space, and I may consider keeping all my mails in some kind of archive. Heck, give me 50 rooms, and I may print out all the emails, together with whatever attachments that come out, file them, and store the files somewhere. Of course, we'll probably kill many many trees somewhere along the way, but it's all for the sake of keeping our records properly.
Actually, there are already methods available to figure out what the chip does currently. I have heard of one that tries to measure the power usage, at each fetch-execute cycle, and based on that, can figure out what kind of instructions have been run. The CPU already gives out EM radiation which can be detected. It may be just a matter of figuring out what kind of signal is radiated when each instruction is being executed to know what instructions are being run. So the same security concerns already exist today.