OS X does translucency everywhere. Everything from icons to menus to windows is alpha-blended. The drop shadow attached to every single window is an alpha-blending effect. The true curved corners are an alpha-blending effect. All the window animations are alpha-blended. The effects are all very subtle, but at the same time, they're pervasive.
Have you ever used an OS X machine? OS X has been fully composited since 10.0. If you make a terminal transparent in OS X, you can play a video under it and see the video moving through the terminal window.
Translucency has nothing to do with blurring. Something translucent is just semi-transparent. Technically, all these transparent windows are translucent windows, because they are semi-transparent, not completely transparent.
And OS X can do blurring + translucency just fine --- its a general composited environment. It's just that since OS X translucent elements (mainly menus) already have something to prevent text showing through (pinstripes), it doesn't need to.
In the 2000 Japanese launch of the PS2, 980,000 units were sold the first weekend. In the 2000 United States launch, 510,000 units were sold in the first 24 hours. 1 million for a worldwide launch is nothing.
The biggest problem with the Cube is that if you don't like the few really good games they have, you're SOL. Back in the days of the SNES, there were the big-name games (the new Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong), but there was other stuff too. Lots of stuff in lots of different categories (kinda like the PS2's library). The GC has some extremely good titles (which I mostly have no interest in playing, since they aren't in my preferred genres), but no depth in any given category.
How is Skype more easily pronouncable than Ekiga? How do you pronounce "Skype" anyway --- is it like "skip" or "skyp" or even "skyp-e". For Ekiga, I can see Eck-E-Ga, Eck-I-Ga, but anything else is a bit of a stretch. Other than that, it's short, easy to spell, only three syllables, and most of all, unique.
You're only making the association because you've heard of the product before. "Safari" doesn't imply "exploring the web" any more than it implies "exploring your photo album". When I hear "Dreamweaver", I'm much more apt to think "video editor" or "animation package" than "HTML editor". Same thing for PowerPoint --- the connection makes sense if you know what it is "oh, you point during a presentation", but before that?
You're basically saying that certain names can be vaguely tied to their purposes after you know what they do. But at that point, it really doesn't matter, does it? It's not like these names are are useful descriptions to someone who doesn't already know what the software does (like iPhoto or iTunes). The fact that they still work pretty well shows that software names are just that --- names. Names aren't meant to be descriptive, they're meant to be short and easy to remember. I'm sure your name isn't "annoy guy who hangs out on Slashdot" is it? It's probably something completely undescriptive --- like "John" or "Ted".
The word "Islamic" is a way of referring to a specific group of people with a specific culture. Since technology has historically been carried along by culture, referring to "Islamic inventions" makes sense. It's just like referring to "Chinese" inventions. Note the word "Chinese" in that term has nothing to do with the country China (which is a modern construction), but rather refers to the "Chinese" as a specific group of people. Looking at it the other way: what other term would you use? Arab? Well, Iraqis, Persians, and many people in the subcontinent aren't Arab. "Islamic" is used because it is something that ties those people together and allows us to refer to them as a group.
Consider the phrase "Christian world". That phrase has a specific meaning --- it refers to the population of Europe from the Middle Ages to just before the industrial revolutions. It is correct (and common), to do things like refer to the philosophy or literature or art of the "Christian world". The phrase conveys a specific meaning that "European" (or Italian or whatever) does not.
Oh please don't tell me you're one of those people who believe the airliner didn't really hit the Pentagon. Please. Most of the websites I've seen on that are so completely retarded. One idiot has a website where he shows a turbine disk from the wreckage (like 18 inches across), shows an engine from a 757 (5-6 feet across), and asks how such a small disk could come from such a big engine. Of course, turbine disks are always tiny --- on a turbofan the core airflow path where the turbine sits is very small compared to the overall airflow path of the engine. Not to mention its highly compressed before it hits the turbine!
I'm an AE and ignorance of the people pushing this theory is phenomenal. Of course an airplane can disintegrate after hitting a large solid structure at hundreds of miles per hour! Airplanes are mostly tubes of sheet metal for god's sake! Almost every significant piece is hollow to save weight. The designers even count on the membrane effect of the sheet metal skin being pressurized to handle some of the rigidity requirements of the aircraft. Airplanes can disintigrate just from run-away vibrational effects. The fact that a 300 mph collision into a concrete building did the trick is not surprising at all.
The word "Islamic" doesn't just refer to the religion, but the people as a whole. The phrase "Islamic Inventions" could be construed to mean either "inventions that were the result of Islam", or "inventions created by the Islamic world". The article in question is obviously reffering to the latter.
The need to hand-edit text files happens when the automatic configuration mechanisms fail. It's regretable that the mechansisms fail, but it's inevitable. The hardware wasn't certified for Linux, it was certified to run Windows. If you bought a machine with Linux, you wouldn't have to do any configuration or tweeking.
Your point can more generally be put as: Joe Sixpack isn't going to install an OS on his computer.
Well duh. Anyone who is expecting any OS to enter the mainstream by having Joe Sixpack download and install it is delusional. Joe Sixpack barely even knows what an OS is, much less that there is any other type of OS.
People who support Linux on the desktop realize that it will happen through pre-installed machines and corporate deployments. In both cases, Joe Sixpack won't have to edit any.conf files --- the hardware will be pre-configured and certified to run Linux.
It's essentially an unavoidable issue for any alternative OS. Few vendors certify their products on Linux (they sell the PCs with Windows, after all), and the Linux developers can only test on a fraction of the possible combinations of hardware.
Your best if you're serious about running Linux is usually to get a Dell system. Their hardware is extremely vanilla --- basically Intel CPU and motherboard + a NVIDIA graphics card.
There are indirect ways of measuring temperature. You can measure the energy emitted by radiation, and use that to calculate temperature via Boltzman's law.
These days, the big isue isn't transistor switching speed, but wire delay. It's possible to make very high speed ALUs (using dynamic logic, the ALUs in a Pentium 4 run up to 7.6 GHz), but getting instructions to it becomes very difficult without inserting pipeline stages just to allow the signal to propagate on the wires.
Apple systems have been standard PCs for quite awhile now. Aside from the CPU and motherboard, everything else is standard PC hardware. And even on the motherboard, the only thing really different is the CPU interface, so the only real variable was really the processor.
Wow, that's a great post. It's relatively rare to see someone who is willing to consider political choices in terms of political reality, as opposed to ivory-tower ideology. As someone who has lived in Asia (I was born in Thailand, my parents are from Bangladesh), its refreshing to hear from someone who doesn't just think about democracy in terms of platitudes.
I don't think CATIA actually does finite element analysis on NURBS. It may use it as the core element for handling geometry, but I think they're decomposed to more traditional elements for the actual FEM process.
The code size isn't really representative of much. You can do simple finite element analysis in a few hundred lines of Matlab. Indeed, once you've formulated your element equations, solving them for a given mesh is quite straightforward. The real meat in most finite element programs is in the mesh generator and the solver. Building a mesh generator that can create good meshes for a wide variety of situations is a non-trivial task. The same is true for creating solvers that can handle (quickly) the extremely large systems of equations resutling from complex problems. A lot of code gets spent on additional features, like allowing the code to selectively solve parts of the problem, etc.
So depending on the sophistication of the program, 35,000 lines could be a very small codebase, or an unnecessarily large one.
The best language in existence for writing a compiler is Lisp. No joke. Ever look at the GCC source code? They go to enormous lengths to make C look like Lisp. Between dynamic typing, generic dispatch, macros, and garbage collection, Lisp has all the features necessary to make a good language for writing compilers.
I'll give you C for the kernel, but for a network stack, I'm on the fence. Lisp's macros make it very easy to build up primitives for handling structured bytestreams, which abound in network programming. Moreover, macros aren't really an expensive language feature (they are expanded at compile time usually), so performance shouldn't be too far off either.
Even if the rest is assumed to be true, they also hate us because we refuse to submit to Islam, on top of all that.
The vast majority of the people couldn't care less about the religion of a bunch of people on the other side of the world. We're talking about the common people here --- ideology isn't very useful if your major goal is to put food on the table. Undoubtedly, there are people who hate us because we refuse to submit to Islam. But those people would never get the kind of support they do among the masses of people if it weren't for the political factors. Joe Palestinian isn't going to get riled up if the Mullah tells him "there are all these non-believers in America!". He'll say "that's nice, I've gotta go work so I can feed my family". If he tells him "these non-believers in America support Israel, which stole your land!" Well, that'll get him riled up.
The key thing here is sustainability. What forms of strife are sustainable? Those based on ideology alone aren't. The number of examples throughout history where ideological strife has lasted for any length of time in the absence of political strife or competition for resources is slim. Simply, the masses of people will always be concerned foremost with their day-to-day lives, and ideology doesn't fit too well with that. Political strife, on the other hand, is quite sustainable. If people believe their day to day lives are made harder because of some political entity, that's a different situation indeed.
And that's the popular excuse for hating us these days as well
I don't think you're very in-touch with the state of the Muslim world. When was the last time you were in a Muslim country, or spoke to a Muslim for that matter? The popular excuse for hating America has been, for the last couple of decades, and will continue to be, for the forseeable future, America's support of Israel. The whole invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq is the new popular excuse. Religion is actually quite far down on the list.
Look --- the masses of Mulsims aren't irrational. They may be uneducated, poor, and willing to absorb a lot of rhetoric spouted by their leaders, but they aren't irrational. Their basic human instincts of survival and maintainence of their society are intact. The assumption that Muslims will continue to hate us no matter what we do, just because of religion, is couched in the assumption of their irrationality. It's also an assumption that has very stark reprecussions --- either they must be destroyed or we will be destroyed. That's not a line of thinking that gives you a whole lot of options for action, and its not a very useful assumption if your goal is the solving of the underlying problem (fortunately for some people --- most of the leaders on both sides are uninterested in solving the problem...)
and an excuse for hating Joe Citizen instead of just the government or the army or such. And if you give it enough time and it'll change from just the Excuse to a real Reason.
Religious hatred is historically unsustainable among the masses. Most instances in history where religious factors have caused long-term strife between groups have been the result of political factors, not religion itself, even if religion was the supposed cause. This is true for everything from the persecution of Muslims in Spain to the persecution of Jews in Germany to the warring between Byzantine Christians and Muslims. Religion is almost always a cover for some political purpose, and when that political purpose dissipates, the assertion of religion also dissipates. It's the history fo the world...
A weakness in American thinking is our assumption that we are somehow special, and our circumstances are unprecedented in history. This causes us to ignore the lessons of history in choosing our course of action. Of course, there is nothing new under the sun. The basic social dynamics that have driven history to this point will continue to drive history long after we are gone. There are no hard-and fast rules to human behavior, but there are patterns that will generally be followed, and its foolish to not take advantage of our knowledge of those patterns.
They may view our "nuclear nirvana" with hatred, but they already view us with hatred because we will not bend to their will and follow their religion.
I have no doubt in my mind that we'll never solve our problems with the Middle East. It will haunt us indefinitely, because we seem to be too stupid to realize the nature of the problem and thus the solution.
Religious ideology doesn't make a whole country on the other side of the planet hate you. It's an irrational and ideological belief. It's based on a delusion that there is something special about us or them. Neither is true. Iranians hate America not because we refuse to submit to Islam, but because we propped up an unpopular monarchy, have constantly threatened, meddled with, and embargoed their country, impede their development of technology, and because we support an antagonistic nuclear power in their back yard with money and weapons.
I'm not going to argue that interfering with another country's affairs is morally wrong --- that's a subjective opinion. I will argue, however, that if sticking your finger in the power socket hurts, it makes more sense to stop doing it than to try to change the nature of electricity. Ironically, terrorism has managed to accomplish precisely what the terrorists need to stay relevant. America can't disengage from the Middle East because the people view that as capitulating to the terrorists. Terrorism has effectively guided American policy --- we are prevented from persuing the logical course of action because of it.
Slashdot Mirror
OS X does translucency everywhere. Everything from icons to menus to windows is alpha-blended. The drop shadow attached to every single window is an alpha-blending effect. The true curved corners are an alpha-blending effect. All the window animations are alpha-blended. The effects are all very subtle, but at the same time, they're pervasive.
Have you ever used an OS X machine? OS X has been fully composited since 10.0. If you make a terminal transparent in OS X, you can play a video under it and see the video moving through the terminal window.
Translucency has nothing to do with blurring. Something translucent is just semi-transparent. Technically, all these transparent windows are translucent windows, because they are semi-transparent, not completely transparent.
And OS X can do blurring + translucency just fine --- its a general composited environment. It's just that since OS X translucent elements (mainly menus) already have something to prevent text showing through (pinstripes), it doesn't need to.
In the 2000 Japanese launch of the PS2, 980,000 units were sold the first weekend. In the 2000 United States launch, 510,000 units were sold in the first 24 hours. 1 million for a worldwide launch is nothing.
The biggest problem with the Cube is that if you don't like the few really good games they have, you're SOL. Back in the days of the SNES, there were the big-name games (the new Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong), but there was other stuff too. Lots of stuff in lots of different categories (kinda like the PS2's library). The GC has some extremely good titles (which I mostly have no interest in playing, since they aren't in my preferred genres), but no depth in any given category.
Safari is a Beach Boys reference? And as I said, exploration could very well refer to other types of exploration.
Your link is really tenuous here...
How is Skype more easily pronouncable than Ekiga? How do you pronounce "Skype" anyway --- is it like "skip" or "skyp" or even "skyp-e". For Ekiga, I can see Eck-E-Ga, Eck-I-Ga, but anything else is a bit of a stretch. Other than that, it's short, easy to spell, only three syllables, and most of all, unique.
You're only making the association because you've heard of the product before. "Safari" doesn't imply "exploring the web" any more than it implies "exploring your photo album". When I hear "Dreamweaver", I'm much more apt to think "video editor" or "animation package" than "HTML editor". Same thing for PowerPoint --- the connection makes sense if you know what it is "oh, you point during a presentation", but before that?
You're basically saying that certain names can be vaguely tied to their purposes after you know what they do. But at that point, it really doesn't matter, does it? It's not like these names are are useful descriptions to someone who doesn't already know what the software does (like iPhoto or iTunes). The fact that they still work pretty well shows that software names are just that --- names. Names aren't meant to be descriptive, they're meant to be short and easy to remember. I'm sure your name isn't "annoy guy who hangs out on Slashdot" is it? It's probably something completely undescriptive --- like "John" or "Ted".
The word "Islamic" is a way of referring to a specific group of people with a specific culture. Since technology has historically been carried along by culture, referring to "Islamic inventions" makes sense. It's just like referring to "Chinese" inventions. Note the word "Chinese" in that term has nothing to do with the country China (which is a modern construction), but rather refers to the "Chinese" as a specific group of people. Looking at it the other way: what other term would you use? Arab? Well, Iraqis, Persians, and many people in the subcontinent aren't Arab. "Islamic" is used because it is something that ties those people together and allows us to refer to them as a group.
Consider the phrase "Christian world". That phrase has a specific meaning --- it refers to the population of Europe from the Middle Ages to just before the industrial revolutions. It is correct (and common), to do things like refer to the philosophy or literature or art of the "Christian world". The phrase conveys a specific meaning that "European" (or Italian or whatever) does not.
Oh please don't tell me you're one of those people who believe the airliner didn't really hit the Pentagon. Please. Most of the websites I've seen on that are so completely retarded. One idiot has a website where he shows a turbine disk from the wreckage (like 18 inches across), shows an engine from a 757 (5-6 feet across), and asks how such a small disk could come from such a big engine. Of course, turbine disks are always tiny --- on a turbofan the core airflow path where the turbine sits is very small compared to the overall airflow path of the engine. Not to mention its highly compressed before it hits the turbine!
I'm an AE and ignorance of the people pushing this theory is phenomenal. Of course an airplane can disintegrate after hitting a large solid structure at hundreds of miles per hour! Airplanes are mostly tubes of sheet metal for god's sake! Almost every significant piece is hollow to save weight. The designers even count on the membrane effect of the sheet metal skin being pressurized to handle some of the rigidity requirements of the aircraft. Airplanes can disintigrate just from run-away vibrational effects. The fact that a 300 mph collision into a concrete building did the trick is not surprising at all.
The word "Islamic" doesn't just refer to the religion, but the people as a whole. The phrase "Islamic Inventions" could be construed to mean either "inventions that were the result of Islam", or "inventions created by the Islamic world". The article in question is obviously reffering to the latter.
The need to hand-edit text files happens when the automatic configuration mechanisms fail. It's regretable that the mechansisms fail, but it's inevitable. The hardware wasn't certified for Linux, it was certified to run Windows. If you bought a machine with Linux, you wouldn't have to do any configuration or tweeking.
.conf files --- the hardware will be pre-configured and certified to run Linux.
Your point can more generally be put as: Joe Sixpack isn't going to install an OS on his computer.
Well duh. Anyone who is expecting any OS to enter the mainstream by having Joe Sixpack download and install it is delusional. Joe Sixpack barely even knows what an OS is, much less that there is any other type of OS.
People who support Linux on the desktop realize that it will happen through pre-installed machines and corporate deployments. In both cases, Joe Sixpack won't have to edit any
It's essentially an unavoidable issue for any alternative OS. Few vendors certify their products on Linux (they sell the PCs with Windows, after all), and the Linux developers can only test on a fraction of the possible combinations of hardware.
Your best if you're serious about running Linux is usually to get a Dell system. Their hardware is extremely vanilla --- basically Intel CPU and motherboard + a NVIDIA graphics card.
There are indirect ways of measuring temperature. You can measure the energy emitted by radiation, and use that to calculate temperature via Boltzman's law.
These days, the big isue isn't transistor switching speed, but wire delay. It's possible to make very high speed ALUs (using dynamic logic, the ALUs in a Pentium 4 run up to 7.6 GHz), but getting instructions to it becomes very difficult without inserting pipeline stages just to allow the signal to propagate on the wires.
Apple systems have been standard PCs for quite awhile now. Aside from the CPU and motherboard, everything else is standard PC hardware. And even on the motherboard, the only thing really different is the CPU interface, so the only real variable was really the processor.
Wow, that's a great post. It's relatively rare to see someone who is willing to consider political choices in terms of political reality, as opposed to ivory-tower ideology. As someone who has lived in Asia (I was born in Thailand, my parents are from Bangladesh), its refreshing to hear from someone who doesn't just think about democracy in terms of platitudes.
I don't think CATIA actually does finite element analysis on NURBS. It may use it as the core element for handling geometry, but I think they're decomposed to more traditional elements for the actual FEM process.
The code size isn't really representative of much. You can do simple finite element analysis in a few hundred lines of Matlab. Indeed, once you've formulated your element equations, solving them for a given mesh is quite straightforward. The real meat in most finite element programs is in the mesh generator and the solver. Building a mesh generator that can create good meshes for a wide variety of situations is a non-trivial task. The same is true for creating solvers that can handle (quickly) the extremely large systems of equations resutling from complex problems. A lot of code gets spent on additional features, like allowing the code to selectively solve parts of the problem, etc.
So depending on the sophistication of the program, 35,000 lines could be a very small codebase, or an unnecessarily large one.
I know. The Cell's cores are SMT, not "dual core" as the OP alleged.
The XBox 360 chip has a single chip with three cores. The cores are dual-threaded, but only has one set of execution resources.
The best language in existence for writing a compiler is Lisp. No joke. Ever look at the GCC source code? They go to enormous lengths to make C look like Lisp. Between dynamic typing, generic dispatch, macros, and garbage collection, Lisp has all the features necessary to make a good language for writing compilers.
I'll give you C for the kernel, but for a network stack, I'm on the fence. Lisp's macros make it very easy to build up primitives for handling structured bytestreams, which abound in network programming. Moreover, macros aren't really an expensive language feature (they are expanded at compile time usually), so performance shouldn't be too far off either.
Even if the rest is assumed to be true, they also hate us because we refuse to submit to Islam, on top of all that.
The vast majority of the people couldn't care less about the religion of a bunch of people on the other side of the world. We're talking about the common people here --- ideology isn't very useful if your major goal is to put food on the table. Undoubtedly, there are people who hate us because we refuse to submit to Islam. But those people would never get the kind of support they do among the masses of people if it weren't for the political factors. Joe Palestinian isn't going to get riled up if the Mullah tells him "there are all these non-believers in America!". He'll say "that's nice, I've gotta go work so I can feed my family". If he tells him "these non-believers in America support Israel, which stole your land!" Well, that'll get him riled up.
The key thing here is sustainability. What forms of strife are sustainable? Those based on ideology alone aren't. The number of examples throughout history where ideological strife has lasted for any length of time in the absence of political strife or competition for resources is slim. Simply, the masses of people will always be concerned foremost with their day-to-day lives, and ideology doesn't fit too well with that. Political strife, on the other hand, is quite sustainable. If people believe their day to day lives are made harder because of some political entity, that's a different situation indeed.
And that's the popular excuse for hating us these days as well
I don't think you're very in-touch with the state of the Muslim world. When was the last time you were in a Muslim country, or spoke to a Muslim for that matter? The popular excuse for hating America has been, for the last couple of decades, and will continue to be, for the forseeable future, America's support of Israel. The whole invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq is the new popular excuse. Religion is actually quite far down on the list.
Look --- the masses of Mulsims aren't irrational. They may be uneducated, poor, and willing to absorb a lot of rhetoric spouted by their leaders, but they aren't irrational. Their basic human instincts of survival and maintainence of their society are intact. The assumption that Muslims will continue to hate us no matter what we do, just because of religion, is couched in the assumption of their irrationality. It's also an assumption that has very stark reprecussions --- either they must be destroyed or we will be destroyed. That's not a line of thinking that gives you a whole lot of options for action, and its not a very useful assumption if your goal is the solving of the underlying problem (fortunately for some people --- most of the leaders on both sides are uninterested in solving the problem...)
and an excuse for hating Joe Citizen instead of just the government or the army or such. And if you give it enough time and it'll change from just the Excuse to a real Reason.
Religious hatred is historically unsustainable among the masses. Most instances in history where religious factors have caused long-term strife between groups have been the result of political factors, not religion itself, even if religion was the supposed cause. This is true for everything from the persecution of Muslims in Spain to the persecution of Jews in Germany to the warring between Byzantine Christians and Muslims. Religion is almost always a cover for some political purpose, and when that political purpose dissipates, the assertion of religion also dissipates. It's the history fo the world...
A weakness in American thinking is our assumption that we are somehow special, and our circumstances are unprecedented in history. This causes us to ignore the lessons of history in choosing our course of action. Of course, there is nothing new under the sun. The basic social dynamics that have driven history to this point will continue to drive history long after we are gone. There are no hard-and fast rules to human behavior, but there are patterns that will generally be followed, and its foolish to not take advantage of our knowledge of those patterns.
They may view our "nuclear nirvana" with hatred, but they already view us with hatred because we will not bend to their will and follow their religion.
I have no doubt in my mind that we'll never solve our problems with the Middle East. It will haunt us indefinitely, because we seem to be too stupid to realize the nature of the problem and thus the solution.
Religious ideology doesn't make a whole country on the other side of the planet hate you. It's an irrational and ideological belief. It's based on a delusion that there is something special about us or them. Neither is true. Iranians hate America not because we refuse to submit to Islam, but because we propped up an unpopular monarchy, have constantly threatened, meddled with, and embargoed their country, impede their development of technology, and because we support an antagonistic nuclear power in their back yard with money and weapons.
I'm not going to argue that interfering with another country's affairs is morally wrong --- that's a subjective opinion. I will argue, however, that if sticking your finger in the power socket hurts, it makes more sense to stop doing it than to try to change the nature of electricity. Ironically, terrorism has managed to accomplish precisely what the terrorists need to stay relevant. America can't disengage from the Middle East because the people view that as capitulating to the terrorists. Terrorism has effectively guided American policy --- we are prevented from persuing the logical course of action because of it.
...cough...Nevada....
We're not using those middle states for anything, right?