He once said "Even if there were a nuclear war, the Earth may be destroyed. This would be a minor event for the solar system, but not for the universe."
I couldn't find a link to the exact quote on the web, but its something like that. I remember reading it in John Lewis Gaddis' book on the Cold War.
This simplification of reality fails to take into account the human aspect of work. Productivity is a nonlinear function with respect to how many hours someone works. Work is more than just pumping out widgets. For example, the well rested and happy programmer is able to come up with a better solution to a problem than the one who is tired, agitated, and obsessed. I noticed that the times that I have breakthroughs are not when I'm furiously concentrating on my work, but instead when I am coming back to it with a clean slate (like in the shower in the morning).
Likewise, the happy and cordial retailer earns more customer loyalty through his courteous attitude than the retailer who is stressed and exhausted. This same line of reason was used to justify limiting the hours of medical residents to 80 hours a week. Would you want someone who hasn't slept in two days working on you? --I don't think so.
And you think in a country where power is bought with the almighty dollar, that your opinions matter?
What the poster said is that "there is no democratic control of the armed forces." I think that having one person as the commander in cheif is not a "democratic control." Especially when much of the US and most of the world disagrees with his decision to go to war.
This makes sense when you are talking about an ideal, efficient market. However, the monopoly that Microsoft has is anything but efficient. For example, consumers buy Microsoft Word because it is the only way to reliably read the current standard doc format. This is only because Microsoft used underhanded tactics to make their format hard to understand.
It would be much more ideal if somehow Microsoft was forced by the government to use an open standard document format. If you use something like XML for the format, then it is EXTENSIBLE, and nobody can make the argument that it stifles innovation.
The benefit to the software industry and US economy would be tremendous.
I had to work on my girlfriend's Audi A4 once. I accidentally drove up too steep of a slope and scraped the front of it on the ground. After a couple of days, the power steering suddenly went out, and I realized I had punctured the power steering fluid cooler. I thought no problem to fix, right? $100 for a small U-shaped aluminum tube, and a couple new rubber hose clamps.
However, unlike the american cars that I am used to, I found that the Audi hose clamps don't have a screw to loosen/tighten them. Instead they require a special tool to put them on, and you have to cut them off! It took me 1.5 hrs to cut two clamps off, and I ruined my shop cutters. I'd love to talk to the engineer who decided to use those stupid clamps over normal ones.
I am appalled at the idea of manufacturers intentionally (whatever the reason) making cars hard to work on.
Well, I guess I have to poison my karma to post this. Sorry, but I have to point out that you are using circuitous logic.
Ex... I beleive in an omnipotent God because he must have created the universe. Therefore God created the earth in 7 days because he is omnipotent.
Creationism is a farce, and is easily debunked by someone with sufficient knowledge of biology. Only quack scientists are advocates of it as a theory. However, this is a free country and you can believe whatever you want. Just realize you are deluding yourself.
This is just one facet of the greater problem of religious fundamentalism.
The reason why we will use an emulation layer is because the cost of running some X applications at a slower speed will be worth the benefit of Y applications that run significantly faster.
Re:AMD have been better than Intel for some time..
on
AMD Back in the Black
·
· Score: 1
I answer your FUD from my (Athlon) workstation at AMD...
Actually, this "feature" that Intel has installed on their chips allows the P4 to run as fast as it can until it heats up to a certain temperature, then the clock is scaled back. As a result, unless you have optimum cooling (unlikely), you are not getting the best performance out of your computer.
AMD chose to design the Athlon to run at optimum speed under normal conditions. That is why they (we) have a thermal design guide for the heatsink. There is nothing lower quality about this solution.
Furthermore, I believe that with Athlon 64, Intel is now the one trying to create equivalents...
I would have ranked your post Troll, but still, I'll bite.
Your statement "artificial order which could only be created by an intelligent designer," has a non-sequitor. I hold that what you perceive as artificial order is not necessarilly created by an intelligent designer. People think this way because they try to apply their daily experiences. They think that no structure can arise out of randomness, it must instead be made by us. However, from a cosmic perspective this is simply not true. Examples: formations of planets, organic molecules, rock formations (have you seen that "face" on Mars?) This does not violate the second law of thermodynamics.
I have not read Wolfram's book, but from what I understand, he is trying to say that it is the specific properties of our universe which allowed life to form as it is. If the laws of physics or conditions on earth were different, we would not have come about, and therefore we would not be here to ponder our situation.
By the way, intelligent design is not an accepted scientific theory.
I'm guessing that this thing works from detecting a change in the intensity of the light reflected back to indicate an empty glass.
However, I wonder if it would have to be adjusted for Guiness vs. Keystone Light (or Pearl Light if you know what that is [w00t! 68 calories]).
By the way, the only reason I drink cheap beer is because I'm poor, not because I have bad taste. (Well, that and the fact that you can drink a lot more at once).
I would like listening to Phish if they played something else besides incessantly repetitive licks and jams that go nowhere.
The reason why most people listen to Phish is because those same people are a bunch of posers. For some reason it "is cool" to listen to Phish.
If you like the "jam" band genre, and want to hear some real music, check out Widespread Panic. Their guitar solos and rhythms have real emotion and dynamics. As far as songs, the author recommends: "Airplane, Porch Song, Driving Song" these are very accesible to anyone.
Here is my view of what our leaders are thinking...
Rumsfeld: "Yes senator, I realize that the Chinese may acheive superiority in manned spaceflight. But that is irrelevant, because we still have the firepower to blow them up."
Ashcroft: "Instead of learning from their space program, we plan on taking ideas from their 1980s social agendas. The USA Patriot act 2015, plans on monitoring actual human thought with brain implants!"
Bush: "Space Program!? Nah, lets spend our money launching million dollar cruise missiles at people living in caves."
Yeah. I thought the same thing. It seems like if you were going to go through all the trouble of building this system in an old box, you could try to make the authentic keyboard functional.
However, I'll bet you need a scope to analyze the signals properly. I think that keyboard signals are encoded as pulses. I found that out one day when I was looking up some tabs online and playing electric guitar. I noticed if I turned up the amp, I could hear signals of different frequencies for each key I pressed. This was a very cool find.
I suppose you might need some experience with hardware though to design something that could convert from Atari keyboard codes to PS/2 keyboard codes, assuming they are different (which, you can usually assume that hardly anything works the same on arcane hardware).
As mentioned earlier, there seems to be some confusion about what sort of nuclear power we are talking about.
There are three types of nuclear "power" sources in space.
Radioisotope power- this generates electricity because the decay of the isotope heats a thermocouple junction that generates a voltage. I'll bet this is the kind they are using on the spacecraft in question, and it has been used on many other spacecraft, including the Voyager series. Not much isotope is needed, so even if the spacecraft crashes, minimal contamination would occur.
Nuclear reactor power- another way to generate electricity in space is to have a full fledged nuclear reactor onboard the spacecraft. These designs are *very* cool. Generally they use liquid sodium as the conduction medium. Remember, mass is the determining factor in the design. To my knowledge these have never been actually used in space.
Nuclear powered rocket- the most cool rocket ever. Uses a nuclear reactor, that has hydrogen gas "fuel" running through it, superheating that gas. The gas is then ejected out the nozzle at super high speed to provide thrust. There is no electricity generation involved. As mentioned earlier, these rockets are banned by a treaty. None have every launched to my knowledge.
Beer is definitely an acquired taste. Because it is nothing like anything you have tried before. And for god's sake drink more than one before you decide you don't like it.
One of the more regrettable things about SGI is that they spun off the MIPS processor division. My computer architecture class used the MIPS R22000 processor (1985) as the example through which to explain computer architecture. Evidently the MIPS processor had a very elegant and efficient instruction set when compared to most processors (some argue that ARM and Alpha are better, but hey).
Mips stands for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages, and it means that each instruction was executed in one cycle. Therefore, multi cycle depedencies ("locks") did not have to be accounted for, simplifying the design.
Unfortunately their design was not able to keep up mostly because SGI could not afford to stay on the bleeding edge of manufacturing techniques. MIPS lives on in embedded applications, but the last great computer processor was actually able to reach 1 Ghz!
Anyway, people who deal with assembly code (electrical engineers, and esp. compiler writers) can appreciate the relatively small and simple instruction set of the MIPS architecture.
I don't think SGI will be going out of business soon. They have a few cool machines up their sleeve. And customers for whom price is not much of an issue (US Govt. *ehem*) will buy them.
It says in the article that if you don't like the GPL, then don't use its code in your software. Fair enough.
But what if less moral programmers (probably on a small scale) use GPL code in their proprietary software? Is there any way to tell if they have done this? How about searching through binary programs for a certain pattern or something?
I'll bet there are more violations to the GPL than anyone knows about.
There is no way to justify the treatment of Native Americans by European settlers and the American government. Native Americans lived a sustainable lifestyle, and did not grossly overconsume the resources that were available.
They had a right to the land that they lived on because they were there first. They were willing to share their land with European settlers; they did not understand the concept of "owning" a piece of land. But that was not good enough for the Europeans.
Yeah, the pengiun does kinda suck as a mascot for an operating system though. I wish I knew why they chose a penguin over much cooler animals (of course the GNU is not so great, but he's a consequence of the acronym).
Just think of what they could have had instead of the pengiun: a tiger with a red bandana, a toucan with colored stripes on his beak, a captain wearing a blue uniform, a vampire, a white rabbit, and of course a paranoid leprechaun? Too bad linux was developed after all these great mascots were copyrighted!
Of course we can still switch to using a robot that bears a striking resemblence to Micheal Jackson without his plastic nose on! Check this out! AHHH!
But the story says that communications between programs "could not be intercepted." I am assuming this means that it is encrypted, and that in this system the hardware stores some kind of unique private key. If this is the case, there is nothing new here that open source software hasn't provided. We have GnuGP for trusted email, and OpenSSH for shells, file transfers, and there's even a plugin for Gaim!
I don't understand why you would want some sort of hardware encryption. Because lets say AMD/Intel produce the keys. How hard would it be for them to keep a list of these keys and give copies to the FBI/CIA? Then, even when you *think* you are using a trusted platform you are being monitored. At least right now I know that I am not using secure communications.
My experience with this program!
on
Eyes on Karamba
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· Score: 2, Informative
Not trying to be a troll here or anything. But this program is really just something that looks nice in the screenshot, but is not really useful.
I actually installed KDE last week, then Karaba and fiddled with both of them. The interesting thing was that I found that I could attach menu entries directly to the panel, like the "drawers" in CDE. But all they really were is just "links" to the regular menu items.
Anyway here's what I really liked about KDE: 1. Konqueror: its damn fast! 2. graphics: KDE is overall pretty nice, and I absolutely LOVE the BeOS style window theme.
Did not like: 1. No way to put a system monitor in the panel 2. Stability: Konqueror seems to crash a couple times a day, sometimes locking the X server! (Probably because I compiled w/ -03 optimizations).
Anyway, I found that gnome supports the drawers better than KDE does! Drawers are definitely the most efficient UI design I have seen. WAY better than the "start menu" where everything springs out of one button. The fact that you can even have sub drawers is pretty cool.
To summarize: Karamba = pretty, not useful, wastes resources Drawers in Gnome = useful, somewhat pretty
Hey if you go to the website, check out the pipe!. Its pretty cool. Imagine loading a bowl in that thing and smoking with your buddies. They would be quite impressed to know it was designed by Porsche!
Would it be illegal to sell in the US? Or is that just water pipes?
Slashdot Mirror
Did you know that you just quoted Mao Zedong?
He once said "Even if there were a nuclear war, the Earth may be destroyed. This would be a minor event for the solar system, but not for the universe."
I couldn't find a link to the exact quote on the web, but its something like that. I remember reading it in John Lewis Gaddis' book on the Cold War.
This simplification of reality fails to take into account the human aspect of work. Productivity is a nonlinear function with respect to how many hours someone works. Work is more than just pumping out widgets. For example, the well rested and happy programmer is able to come up with a better solution to a problem than the one who is tired, agitated, and obsessed. I noticed that the times that I have breakthroughs are not when I'm furiously concentrating on my work, but instead when I am coming back to it with a clean slate (like in the shower in the morning).
Likewise, the happy and cordial retailer earns more customer loyalty through his courteous attitude than the retailer who is stressed and exhausted. This same line of reason was used to justify limiting the hours of medical residents to 80 hours a week. Would you want someone who hasn't slept in two days working on you? --I don't think so.
-1: Troll
And you think in a country where power is bought with the almighty dollar, that your opinions matter?
What the poster said is that "there is no democratic control of the armed forces." I think that having one person as the commander in cheif is not a "democratic control." Especially when much of the US and most of the world disagrees with his decision to go to war.
It would be much more ideal if somehow Microsoft was forced by the government to use an open standard document format. If you use something like XML for the format, then it is EXTENSIBLE, and nobody can make the argument that it stifles innovation.
The benefit to the software industry and US economy would be tremendous.
I had to work on my girlfriend's Audi A4 once. I accidentally drove up too steep of a slope and scraped the front of it on the ground. After a couple of days, the power steering suddenly went out, and I realized I had punctured the power steering fluid cooler. I thought no problem to fix, right? $100 for a small U-shaped aluminum tube, and a couple new rubber hose clamps.
However, unlike the american cars that I am used to, I found that the Audi hose clamps don't have a screw to loosen/tighten them. Instead they require a special tool to put them on, and you have to cut them off! It took me 1.5 hrs to cut two clamps off, and I ruined my shop cutters. I'd love to talk to the engineer who decided to use those stupid clamps over normal ones.
I am appalled at the idea of manufacturers intentionally (whatever the reason) making cars hard to work on.
Well, I guess I have to poison my karma to post this. Sorry, but I have to point out that you are using circuitous logic.
Ex...
I beleive in an omnipotent God because he must have created the universe. Therefore God created the earth in 7 days because he is omnipotent.
Creationism is a farce, and is easily debunked by someone with sufficient knowledge of biology. Only quack scientists are advocates of it as a theory. However, this is a free country and you can believe whatever you want. Just realize you are deluding yourself.
This is just one facet of the greater problem of religious fundamentalism.
The reason why we will use an emulation layer is because the cost of running some X applications at a slower speed will be worth the benefit of Y applications that run significantly faster.
I answer your FUD from my (Athlon) workstation at AMD...
Actually, this "feature" that Intel has installed on their chips allows the P4 to run as fast as it can until it heats up to a certain temperature, then the clock is scaled back. As a result, unless you have optimum cooling (unlikely), you are not getting the best performance out of your computer.
AMD chose to design the Athlon to run at optimum speed under normal conditions. That is why they (we) have a thermal design guide for the heatsink. There is nothing lower quality about this solution. Furthermore, I believe that with Athlon 64, Intel is now the one trying to create equivalents...
I would have ranked your post Troll, but still, I'll bite.
Your statement "artificial order which could only be created by an intelligent designer," has a non-sequitor. I hold that what you perceive as artificial order is not necessarilly created by an intelligent designer. People think this way because they try to apply their daily experiences. They think that no structure can arise out of randomness, it must instead be made by us. However, from a cosmic perspective this is simply not true. Examples: formations of planets, organic molecules, rock formations (have you seen that "face" on Mars?) This does not violate the second law of thermodynamics.
I have not read Wolfram's book, but from what I understand, he is trying to say that it is the specific properties of our universe which allowed life to form as it is. If the laws of physics or conditions on earth were different, we would not have come about, and therefore we would not be here to ponder our situation.
By the way, intelligent design is not an accepted scientific theory.
yeah, yeah, RTFS but...
I'm guessing that this thing works from detecting a change in the intensity of the light reflected back to indicate an empty glass.
However, I wonder if it would have to be adjusted for Guiness vs. Keystone Light (or Pearl Light if you know what that is [w00t! 68 calories]).
By the way, the only reason I drink cheap beer is because I'm poor, not because I have bad taste. (Well, that and the fact that you can drink a lot more at once).
I'm writing this post from the 5th floor computer lab in ENS.
Yeah, 316 sucks, but a lot worse is coming to you.
Blasphemy.
I would like listening to Phish if they played something else besides incessantly repetitive licks and jams that go nowhere.
The reason why most people listen to Phish is because those same people are a bunch of posers. For some reason it "is cool" to listen to Phish.
If you like the "jam" band genre, and want to hear some real music, check out Widespread Panic. Their guitar solos and rhythms have real emotion and dynamics. As far as songs, the author recommends: "Airplane, Porch Song, Driving Song" these are very accesible to anyone.
Here is my view of what our leaders are thinking...
Rumsfeld: "Yes senator, I realize that the Chinese may acheive superiority in manned spaceflight. But that is irrelevant, because we still have the firepower to blow them up."
Ashcroft: "Instead of learning from their space program, we plan on taking ideas from their 1980s social agendas. The USA Patriot act 2015, plans on monitoring actual human thought with brain implants!"
Bush: "Space Program!? Nah, lets spend our money launching million dollar cruise missiles at people living in caves."
Yeah. I thought the same thing. It seems like if you were going to go through all the trouble of building this system in an old box, you could try to make the authentic keyboard functional.
However, I'll bet you need a scope to analyze the signals properly. I think that keyboard signals are encoded as pulses. I found that out one day when I was looking up some tabs online and playing electric guitar. I noticed if I turned up the amp, I could hear signals of different frequencies for each key I pressed. This was a very cool find.
I suppose you might need some experience with hardware though to design something that could convert from Atari keyboard codes to PS/2 keyboard codes, assuming they are different (which, you can usually assume that hardly anything works the same on arcane hardware).
As mentioned earlier, there seems to be some confusion about what sort of nuclear power we are talking about.
There are three types of nuclear "power" sources in space.
Radioisotope power- this generates electricity because the decay of the isotope heats a thermocouple junction that generates a voltage. I'll bet this is the kind they are using on the spacecraft in question, and it has been used on many other spacecraft, including the Voyager series. Not much isotope is needed, so even if the spacecraft crashes, minimal contamination would occur.
Nuclear reactor power- another way to generate electricity in space is to have a full fledged nuclear reactor onboard the spacecraft. These designs are *very* cool. Generally they use liquid sodium as the conduction medium. Remember, mass is the determining factor in the design. To my knowledge these have never been actually used in space.
Nuclear powered rocket- the most cool rocket ever. Uses a nuclear reactor, that has hydrogen gas "fuel" running through it, superheating that gas. The gas is then ejected out the nozzle at super high speed to provide thrust. There is no electricity generation involved. As mentioned earlier, these rockets are banned by a treaty. None have every launched to my knowledge.
Alright.
*Warning to the sensitive types*
Beer is definitely an acquired taste. Because it is nothing like anything you have tried before. And for god's sake drink more than one before you decide you don't like it.
One of the more regrettable things about SGI is that they spun off the MIPS processor division. My computer architecture class used the MIPS R22000 processor (1985) as the example through which to explain computer architecture. Evidently the MIPS processor had a very elegant and efficient instruction set when compared to most processors (some argue that ARM and Alpha are better, but hey).
Mips stands for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages, and it means that each instruction was executed in one cycle. Therefore, multi cycle depedencies ("locks") did not have to be accounted for, simplifying the design.
Unfortunately their design was not able to keep up mostly because SGI could not afford to stay on the bleeding edge of manufacturing techniques. MIPS lives on in embedded applications, but the last great computer processor was actually able to reach 1 Ghz!
Anyway, people who deal with assembly code (electrical engineers, and esp. compiler writers) can appreciate the relatively small and simple instruction set of the MIPS architecture.
I don't think SGI will be going out of business soon. They have a few cool machines up their sleeve. And customers for whom price is not much of an issue (US Govt. *ehem*) will buy them.
It says in the article that if you don't like the GPL, then don't use its code in your software. Fair enough.
But what if less moral programmers (probably on a small scale) use GPL code in their proprietary software? Is there any way to tell if they have done this? How about searching through binary programs for a certain pattern or something?
I'll bet there are more violations to the GPL than anyone knows about.
There is no way to justify the treatment of Native Americans by European settlers and the American government. Native Americans lived a sustainable lifestyle, and did not grossly overconsume the resources that were available.
They had a right to the land that they lived on because they were there first. They were willing to share their land with European settlers; they did not understand the concept of "owning" a piece of land. But that was not good enough for the Europeans.
True. I love Mozilla because it seems to render stuff very well, especially if you have a good font setup.
But it seems weird how this version of mozilla is being shamelessly promoted. That being said, let me check if there is an ebuild yet...
Yeah, the pengiun does kinda suck as a mascot for an operating system though. I wish I knew why they chose a penguin over much cooler animals (of course the GNU is not so great, but he's a consequence of the acronym).
Just think of what they could have had instead of the pengiun: a tiger with a red bandana, a toucan with colored stripes on his beak, a captain wearing a blue uniform, a vampire, a white rabbit, and of course a paranoid leprechaun? Too bad linux was developed after all these great mascots were copyrighted!
Of course we can still switch to using a robot that bears a striking resemblence to Micheal Jackson without his plastic nose on! Check this out! AHHH!
But the story says that communications between programs "could not be intercepted." I am assuming this means that it is encrypted, and that in this system the hardware stores some kind of unique private key. If this is the case, there is nothing new here that open source software hasn't provided. We have GnuGP for trusted email, and OpenSSH for shells, file transfers, and there's even a plugin for Gaim!
I don't understand why you would want some sort of hardware encryption. Because lets say AMD/Intel produce the keys. How hard would it be for them to keep a list of these keys and give copies to the FBI/CIA? Then, even when you *think* you are using a trusted platform you are being monitored. At least right now I know that I am not using secure communications.
Not trying to be a troll here or anything. But this program is really just something that looks nice in the screenshot, but is not really useful.
I actually installed KDE last week, then Karaba and fiddled with both of them. The interesting thing was that I found that I could attach menu entries directly to the panel, like the "drawers" in CDE. But all they really were is just "links" to the regular menu items.
Anyway here's what I really liked about KDE:
1. Konqueror: its damn fast!
2. graphics: KDE is overall pretty nice, and I absolutely LOVE the BeOS style window theme.
Did not like:
1. No way to put a system monitor in the panel
2. Stability: Konqueror seems to crash a couple times a day, sometimes locking the X server! (Probably because I compiled w/ -03 optimizations).
Anyway, I found that gnome supports the drawers better than KDE does! Drawers are definitely the most efficient UI design I have seen. WAY better than the "start menu" where everything springs out of one button. The fact that you can even have sub drawers is pretty cool.
To summarize:
Karamba = pretty, not useful, wastes resources
Drawers in Gnome = useful, somewhat pretty
When you've got an engineering sample CPU that you got from the company? There's no warranty on that!
Hey if you go to the website, check out the pipe!. Its pretty cool. Imagine loading a bowl in that thing and smoking with your buddies. They would be quite impressed to know it was designed by Porsche!
Would it be illegal to sell in the US? Or is that just water pipes?