Using Desulfuromonas acetoxidans (a Geobacter bacteria) the researchers were able to produce enough electrical current to power a lightbulb or a simple computer.
That's why nerds never wash. They're not unhygenic, just extremely overclocked.
Multiprocessing made easy!
on
Paper Mounted CPUs
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
Just photocopy your CPU and before you know it you have a Beowu...good grief! Is that the time already? Must dash!
A shallower re-entry would require a higher speed to overcome gravity, negating the desired effect of reducing temperature. More significantly, you would now have a situation where the shuttle would bounce straight off the upper atmosphere and back into space, rather like skipping a stone off a pond.
Here's some they missed
on
A Word a Day
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I'm sure these folks would appreciate a slashdotting. They have dozens more of these:
Aquadextrous - adj. Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with your toes.
Gurmlish - n. The red warning flag at the top of a club sandwich which prevents the person from biting into it and puncturing the roof of his mouth.
Sniglet (snig'lit) - n. Any word that doesn't appear in the dictionary, but should.
Lactomangulation - n. Manhandling the "open here" spout on a milk carton so badly that one has to resort to using the "illegal" side.
Mozzalastics (maht suh las' tiks) - n. Large deposits of cheese that stick to the top of the pizza box.
I love the idea of this, although I would be more comfortable knowing that data was not only encrypted but that each file was multiplexed across multiple hosts. Even if the encyption was cracked, the cracker would not have the full picture. Does anyone know if this is the case?
Security aside, I fear that we would see a similar situation to the one we encounter all too frequently on the P2P networks. Users set their download speed to the maximum possible, yet throttle back outgoing data to the absolute minimum, rendering them useless to others. I would hope that this won't happen, but I'm becoming cynical in my old age.
When you read into their arguments and "forecasts" about nano, it becomes clear that Joy and Crichton really don't have an inkling on what they are talking about.
But They sure do sell a lot of books. Jurassic Park may have been technically ridiculous, but it made Crichton a mint and is still appealing to the masses. His audience does not want to be educated, it wants to be entertained. In that light you have to admit he hits the mark pretty well.
The result of their writings, based more on emotion than hard logic, is the disillusionment of the masses against a science that is not properly understood
Not sure that too many people really believed that scientists could soon have dinosaurs rampaging through their back yard.
You got me there. I admit that I did not read the review fully until after I had posted, although I did read it immediately afterwards. The review itself was, in my opinion, pretty nicely written and well researched. It was Phronesis' leading story that made me see red, in that it emphasised the technical shortcomings listed in the review, completely skimming over it's real substance.
I know this isn't really the place to ask this, but has anyone else had problems loading the/. home page? If I move back and forth between stories using the links above the first comment everything works fine, it's just the top level that times out. Just wondering if our sysadmin is blocking http://slashdot.org/ in some way.
After disposing of the bad science (The Reynolds number of nanobots 'the size of red blood cells' would limit their top speed to 2 mm/sec, which would make it hard for them to swarm or chase people; Solar power would provide no more than 20 nanowatts, which would not be sufficient for the activities the book describes; etc.)
When will people ever get it? When you pick up a work of creative fiction you suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride. Stop trying to impress us with your knowledge of science. Get a life, dude!
Let's reinvent the wheel again
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 1
Although I agree that Perl/XML sounds like a powerful and flexible way to serve dynamic content, I can't help thinking that it is ultimately better to adapt existing frameworks (Slashcode, PHP-Nuke & friends etc..). Maybe a friendly group of Perl/XML gods will read the book and produce a framework/toolkit that the rest of us mere mortals can use. I suspect that I will buy this book anyway, read it, and after frying my brain for a few days I will stuff it on my bookshelf and walk away with a huge inferiority complex. My bookshelf makes me look like a guru, but secretly, my encyclopaedic knowledge comes from here.
According to this article, AT&T have devised a technology that won't even tie up your Linux box. I am having one hell of a time keeping pace with the latest innovations.
Re:Duff's Device
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Moving 32 instead of 16 is nice, but IIRC the PowerPC can move 64 in one instruction (note this may take 2 cycles)? I cant' find any of my reference material anywhere, but I could have sworn the 604e and higher can move a double straight up
In my experience, using the FP registers in this way did not yield any performance increase on the PPC. In some cases it was slower.
I'm not familiar with PPC pipeline optimizations, know a good source of reference?
I guess Google is the best place to start. Basically though, the PPC (currently) can perform up to four integer operations in parallel and one floating point operation (hence my suggestion that you use four src & dest pointers, adding 4 to each pointer every time round the loop). If your code requires the completion of a floating point operation before further integer operations can continue, then you could be delaying all four integer pipelines.
AltiVec wouldnt' really offer very much unless you're doing mass mathmatical operations while transfering (add 0 and move 128 bits at once? or does the answer go to a register or the original memory location? can you access memory directly with AltiVec?). Might be nice for some kind of Geiss/G-Force type effects though. Again I'm not familiar with AltiVec in the least, except that it makes complex math fast because it's many mathmatical operations in parallel, and it's only availible on the G4 (and hopefully higher).
AltiVec needs to obtain it's data from somewhere. Consequently, it has 128-bit load and store operations (last time I looked at BlockMoveData() in MacsBug, I noticed that it used them when available. Check out Apple's AltiVec HomePage for a bunch of useful information. It also covers cache optimisation and memory alignment techniques. This (off-topic) sub-thread has kind of assumed that we are only talking about memory copies. Many of the optimisation techniques discussed also apply to other operations on large blocks of memory (e.g. masked copies). We haven't even touched on overlapping memory blocks:)
Re:Duff's Device
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In my experience compilers (nowadays) are quite good at deciding which to use:
You would think so, wouldn't you, but last time I looked at this (last year) CodeWarrior didn't do this. Probably an old version I expect. AFAIR though, the Microsoft compiler seemed to benefit from explicitly using & in place of % as well. IMO, it's always worth double checking the disassembled output if the code is speed critical. You never know what a change in a compiler or it's flags might do.
(Of course I meant & 0x07, not & 0x03)
Re:Duff's Device
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In my other response I omitted the cache manipulation stuff. That really rocks if you get it right. Assembly will seldom beat a good optimiser these days, but a good knowledge of disassembled code will help you write C/C+ code in such a way as to make life easy for the optimiser, whilst still maintaining a degree of portability to your code.
Re:Duff's Device
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Judging by your reference to BlockMove(), I take it you are a Mac programmer? In which case, you would gain a lot more by:
a) Moving 32 bits at a time instead of 16
b) Use four source pointers and four dest pointers, allowing the pipelining to really scream on the PPC
c) Consider using Altivec (very Mac specific though)
d) Lose that f***ing % operator, which will do a lovely job of stalling the integer pipelines while it computes the modulo. ( count & 0x03) does the same thing much quicker.
In some cases, you can easily beat BlockMove(), especially if you know that your memory was nicely aligned on 4 byte boundaries. However, pit you code up against BlockMove() with mis-aligned data (especially if both the source and dest are on weird alignments) then BlockMove() will whip your sorry ass. My $0.02
....of an horrific accident in Redmond, WA, in which the ever popular and much loved Slammer worm has become infected by a particularly pernicious dose of Windosis. A round-the-clock vigil has been in progress since Saturday, and the nations top experts have been called in to try to save Slammer. "17'5 700 34rLy 700 54y 1f w3 c4n 54v3 h1m" said pUrPle_rONniE, a pasty looking spokeman for the uninstall SWAT team. "w3 0wnz y00". This is only the 200,502,738th reported case of Windosis since 1982. The Department of Justice have yet to seal off the area to prevent further contamination.
'failed to deter "submarining" ("Submarine" patents are cases where an erstwhile inventor fails to prosecute an application filed with the PTO until such time as another entity has begun to develop the technology. The applicant then prosecutes the previously filed patent and sues the later party for infringement.)"
Does anyone know of any developments subsequent to this that may address this shitty practice?
Slashdot Mirror
Just photocopy your CPU and before you know it you have a Beowu...good grief! Is that the time already? Must dash!
Smart Ass!
A shallower re-entry would require a higher speed to overcome gravity, negating the desired effect of reducing temperature. More significantly, you would now have a situation where the shuttle would bounce straight off the upper atmosphere and back into space, rather like skipping a stone off a pond.
Aquadextrous - adj. Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with your toes.
Gurmlish - n. The red warning flag at the top of a club sandwich which prevents the person from biting into it and puncturing the roof of his mouth.
Sniglet (snig'lit) - n. Any word that doesn't appear in the dictionary, but should.
Lactomangulation - n. Manhandling the "open here" spout on a milk carton so badly that one has to resort to using the "illegal" side.
Mozzalastics (maht suh las' tiks) - n. Large deposits of cheese that stick to the top of the pizza box.
Yeah. this is kinda what I was alluding to in another post. Let's just pray that nobody compromises this central server - they would own us all.
Security aside, I fear that we would see a similar situation to the one we encounter all too frequently on the P2P networks. Users set their download speed to the maximum possible, yet throttle back outgoing data to the absolute minimum, rendering them useless to others. I would hope that this won't happen, but I'm becoming cynical in my old age.
Papyrus was just trying to be helpful - that didn't warrant a -1 Offtopic.
Considering that 'web' appears five times in the story, I don't think I jumped to any conclusions.
You got me there. I admit that I did not read the review fully until after I had posted, although I did read it immediately afterwards. The review itself was, in my opinion, pretty nicely written and well researched. It was Phronesis' leading story that made me see red, in that it emphasised the technical shortcomings listed in the review, completely skimming over it's real substance.
Go ahead and flame my ass. I earned it.
P.S. Where should I post questions like this?
Although I agree that Perl/XML sounds like a powerful and flexible way to serve dynamic content, I can't help thinking that it is ultimately better to adapt existing frameworks (Slashcode, PHP-Nuke & friends etc..). Maybe a friendly group of Perl/XML gods will read the book and produce a framework/toolkit that the rest of us mere mortals can use. I suspect that I will buy this book anyway, read it, and after frying my brain for a few days I will stuff it on my bookshelf and walk away with a huge inferiority complex. My bookshelf makes me look like a guru, but secretly, my encyclopaedic knowledge comes from here.
1) Crash Test Dummy ...
2) CowboyNeal's PR agent
3)
The list is endless.
...it would at the very least decimate the enemy by incapacitating asthmatic troops.
According to this article, AT&T have devised a technology that won't even tie up your Linux box. I am having one hell of a time keeping pace with the latest innovations.
In my other response I omitted the cache manipulation stuff. That really rocks if you get it right. Assembly will seldom beat a good optimiser these days, but a good knowledge of disassembled code will help you write C/C+ code in such a way as to make life easy for the optimiser, whilst still maintaining a degree of portability to your code.
a) Moving 32 bits at a time instead of 16
b) Use four source pointers and four dest pointers, allowing the pipelining to really scream on the PPC
c) Consider using Altivec (very Mac specific though)
d) Lose that f***ing % operator, which will do a lovely job of stalling the integer pipelines while it computes the modulo. ( count & 0x03) does the same thing much quicker.
In some cases, you can easily beat BlockMove(), especially if you know that your memory was nicely aligned on 4 byte boundaries. However, pit you code up against BlockMove() with mis-aligned data (especially if both the source and dest are on weird alignments) then BlockMove() will whip your sorry ass. My $0.02
....of an horrific accident in Redmond, WA, in which the ever popular and much loved Slammer worm has become infected by a particularly pernicious dose of Windosis. A round-the-clock vigil has been in progress since Saturday, and the nations top experts have been called in to try to save Slammer. "17'5 700 34rLy 700 54y 1f w3 c4n 54v3 h1m" said pUrPle_rONniE, a pasty looking spokeman for the uninstall SWAT team. "w3 0wnz y00". This is only the 200,502,738th reported case of Windosis since 1982. The Department of Justice have yet to seal off the area to prevent further contamination.
...I thought that this was a webcam. I guess that was just wishful thinking. Sigh.