Since when are "the customers" supposed to select the "best" alternative? Isn't it almost always the one with the biggest publicity budget that wins? "oh yeah, I have heard somewhere about that thingy, but look at this! It is everywhere! It must be good!" Even here on my desk I have several things which are here only because of publicity/public acceptance and which have alternatives that are cheaper and better in quality (coca cola, dell computer, imation cdr's, macdonalds lunch,...)
I don't think it would come to that. The french army are not really wimps, and their veteran legion is one of the toughest armies in the world. Just that they do not send troops into a war they consider pointless doesn't mean they are cowards or wimps. It just seems a lot of americans can't take a no for an answer...
I installed the mouse-gestures plugin for firefox, and after learning the most usefull moves, I wouldn't want to browse without it anymore. You have the advantages of navigating with the mouse (browsing with keyboard, bah...) but you don't need to aim for all the tiny buttons on top for reloading, closing tabs, going back and forward... So navigation is now for a great deal intuitive, you need to find the exact location of the pointer only when you really need to click something (still outwins pressing tab 37 times) and also the pointer stays in the center region of the browser, so "mouse-distance" travelled goes down tremendously (can never hurt against repetitive stress disorder and such...)
Pfff just use whatever driver you want. I got a Brother driver talking to a HP2300 laserjet without any problem. OK, there is some loss in functionality and options, but at least the bloody thing prints. So I wonder what really is the difference between e.g. the HP2200 and HP2300 driver? Can't they make some sort of HP core driver and small additional gui's for the different options?
ICEauthority errors are often caused by having no write permissions on your homedir. Also, if your homedir is located on a separate partition, see to it that this gets mounted with correct permissions and ownership, and that ALSO the mountpoint (e.g./home) has correct permissions.
is what I do. We have a linux network, 50 identical pc's, ldap authentication and nfs-imported homedirs. This means I can ssh to each and every of these 50 pc's, and that all these pc's can communicate with each other by exchanging data through this common homedir.
When I need to run a program (calculation, simulation, something that takes a LOT of power) I just make a list of parameter-values I would need to run, and feed them to a script that automatically distributes this over these 50 pc's. With renice 19 nobody notices (except for casefans that go 100%;), and it goes FAST. Although this is not really parallel computing this method is very simple to implement (some bash-scripting, an expect-script for auto-login...) and I've gotten really good results with it.
something similar happened here in Belgium, but with bottles for beverages: They introduced a tax on non-recyclable bottles (some 10 cent I think), but after one year, they got rid of this tax. Why? Because a lot of people were just buying their stuff in other countries (Belgium is really small, you are in another country fast if you want to).
If people go buy their stuff across the border to save some euro's, imagine what they will do to save several tens or hundreds of euros...
Since we have a computerstore at home, at 30 kilometers from the border with the netherlands, I will not complain if they push this tax through. Gotta order some more ipods now though, have to go...
You need massive amounts of matter/energy piled together to produce a natural black hole, one that collapses under it's own weight and becomes a singularity. You can however "force" matter to become so close that the local density is big enough to become singular. Smashing them together at incredible speeds seems to be a way to accomplish this.
Compare this with a hydrogen bomb: You need a lot of hydrogen on a pile to achieve fusion (the weight of our sun seems to do) but if you put a few grams inside the core of an atomic bomb you get some sort of forced fusion, although not stable and very short.
I have a trust spacecam, a very cheapo thingy. I removed this IR filter and reassembled the entire thing within 2 minutes. Didn't put a visible light filter in though.
Because I don't immediately have a remote control lying around here we are smoking cigarettes in the dark to generate IR light, with the cam on. Very cool effect! Very scary faces when taking a puff...:)
For example, if a truck suddenly pulls out in front of you, you will suddenly focus on it; your passenger will tend to notice this and stop talking
Nope, it's usually like "Watch out!" or "Did you see that truck" or... which distracts me even more. Only girlfriends and mothers seem to do this though.
Ok, you are correct. Since such programs do compile I thought there was no problem, but this is indeed a bug after all. Thanks for pointing this out, I will change my sig immediately;)
You are correct in every way, but I think these days the social aspect plays a big role, and people forget about this. Science is not "cool", nerds get picked on,... Science should be made more "sexy". Back in my school, a lot of people really liked science, but just were afraid to show this, being scared to be rejected by the rest of the group/people.
main can be void. It is just the shell that expects a program to return an int on exit, but the shell takes a default value for this if the program doesn't return this value. If you run my sig, it will not really return to your shell:)
PS anyone stupid enough to actually try what happens if you run the program, don't forget to include unistd.h
If this is true, how comes that any program works anyway? If I write a simulation it is of the order a few thousand lines, but I cannot afford ONE bug in there. Publishing wrong results is not something I would like to do. This of course takes a lot of time, testing and debugging.
But to put 30 bugs in each 1000 lines, have it to compile and run cleanly, and then even produce results that somehow hide the obviousness of these bugs and errors must be quite difficult. Anyone an idea of what sort of "bugs" we are talking about here?
Yup that is definitely true. Here in Belgium more than 60% of all cars sold have diesel-engines. The modern diesel-engines of today even have more power and efficiency than all other. I.e. my own car has a 1.7 diesel engine, 90 pk, but only uses 5 liters for 100 km.
When we had a test at the school I went to, grammar and punctuation was always graded. No matter what kind of test, whether it was french, dutch, german, math, physics, history,... you always lost (a lot of) points for making grammatical mistakes. In the beginning this was weird of course (like getting a 4/10 on math without making one error... in the math), but after a while you didn't make spelling or grammatical errors anymore. I still consider this to be a good thing in the end.
PS: I do not speak english natively, so please do not start ranting about possible errors in the above:)
As far as I know random number generators are still algorithms that start from a certain number (the seed) and then generate a sequence of numbers that:
- Doestn't repeat itself for a very long time
- Doesn't have a distinct distribution if you plot them in an N-dimensional space relative to their rank-number (plot number x with value y on axis x modulo N for instance).
There are however several disadvantages: You can easily recreate the sequence when you know the seed, there is always a maximum N whereafter there will be a distinct distribution, and these algorithms often are slow. Now a fast hardware-random number generator could solve all these problems: Your numbers are REALLY ALWAYS random. And this cannot be too difficult to make I guess, since a lot of quantummechanical effects you can observe in electronics are inherently random.
With the current mail-protocol this is indeed almost impossible to achieve. But think of a new protocol: an isp can sell certificates to use this secure email, and when you look at already existing protocols for bank transfers for instance, I think it is certainly possible to make this secure and virtually "un-fraudable". The money can be used to set this all up (buying or hiring registered certificates, maintenance and registration of all the personal data needed,...)
I don't think it would even be very difficult to adjust certain existing bank transfer protocols to excange messages (instead of money) between email-accounts (special registered accounts of course) and keep track of these transfers (and use quota or charge people). We could build a brand new "secure mail infrastructure";)
I have said this before here on slashdot: Charge people for Email, just like regular mail. It does not need to be expensive (i.e. 200 free mails each month, extra mails at a few cents a piece), nobody who can afford an email-account and an internet-connection isn't able to afford this as well, and it would get rid of the whole spam-problem all together.
Or we can make another email-service (-protocol) next to the already existing one, but one that charges you to use it. I would gladly pay a few cents/dollars each month to avoid spam (it takes a lot of my time sifting through all this junk every day).
Actually you aren't really constrained by this maximum speed. Sure, you will never actually see or measure something going faster than c, that is correct, but when you approach c, depending on your point of view, distances become smaller or time goes less fast. Since this is an asymptotic effect and our definition of "velocity" is distance/time, you will never "go faster" than lightspeed. Getting from a to b, wherever in the universe, within x seconds (YOUR seconds, your watch, you are travelling) is possible however.
Your theory could have a ground of truth in it. For instance, when you release helium in our atmosphere, it doesn't stay there, it eventually wanders off in the universe, because it isn't heavy enough to stay ("not sticky enough" is probably better since we are talking about a totally inert gas here). The moon has no atmosphere at all, it gets blown away or gets too hot (too fast) to stay in its gravitational attraction. Mars is somewhere in between regarding mass and has a very thin (5% of our pressure) but heavy (co2 is very heavy but molecular small) atmosphere.
But regarding the water: first of all it requires a lot of energy to make H2 out of water, so existence of H2O does not imply existence of H2 in large amounts. Second of all, liquid water boils immediately at those pressures and temperatures. So the water probably boiled away when the atmosphere became thinner or is locked somewhere in solid form.
A quick calculation of the density, with the assumptions:
1. all of the cards volume is used in the same way, to store data
2. the card actually holds 2 terabytes of data, not just 2 TB adressing
3. They can design and built 3D circuits and chips, not just layered 2D-chips as most others use
results in a byte-density of approx. 38 gigabytes per cubic millimeter. To accomplish this you will need to fit the circuitry and electrical components needed to store 300 bits in a cubic micrometer!
This is A LOT and doesn't seem realistic to me, at least not for the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when are "the customers" supposed to select the "best" alternative? Isn't it almost always the one with the biggest publicity budget that wins? "oh yeah, I have heard somewhere about that thingy, but look at this! It is everywhere! It must be good!" Even here on my desk I have several things which are here only because of publicity/public acceptance and which have alternatives that are cheaper and better in quality (coca cola, dell computer, imation cdr's, macdonalds lunch, ...)
I don't think it would come to that. The french army are not really wimps, and their veteran legion is one of the toughest armies in the world. Just that they do not send troops into a war they consider pointless doesn't mean they are cowards or wimps. It just seems a lot of americans can't take a no for an answer...
I installed the mouse-gestures plugin for firefox, and after learning the most usefull moves, I wouldn't want to browse without it anymore. You have the advantages of navigating with the mouse (browsing with keyboard, bah...) but you don't need to aim for all the tiny buttons on top for reloading, closing tabs, going back and forward... So navigation is now for a great deal intuitive, you need to find the exact location of the pointer only when you really need to click something (still outwins pressing tab 37 times) and also the pointer stays in the center region of the browser, so "mouse-distance" travelled goes down tremendously (can never hurt against repetitive stress disorder and such...)
Pfff just use whatever driver you want. I got a Brother driver talking to a HP2300 laserjet without any problem. OK, there is some loss in functionality and options, but at least the bloody thing prints. So I wonder what really is the difference between e.g. the HP2200 and HP2300 driver? Can't they make some sort of HP core driver and small additional gui's for the different options?
ICEauthority errors are often caused by having no write permissions on your homedir. Also, if your homedir is located on a separate partition, see to it that this gets mounted with correct permissions and ownership, and that ALSO the mountpoint (e.g. /home) has correct permissions.
So that is the reason I met almost no girls in my physics education ;)
is what I do. We have a linux network, 50 identical pc's, ldap authentication and nfs-imported homedirs. This means I can ssh to each and every of these 50 pc's, and that all these pc's can communicate with each other by exchanging data through this common homedir.
;), and it goes FAST. Although this is not really parallel computing this method is very simple to implement (some bash-scripting, an expect-script for auto-login...) and I've gotten really good results with it.
When I need to run a program (calculation, simulation, something that takes a LOT of power) I just make a list of parameter-values I would need to run, and feed them to a script that automatically distributes this over these 50 pc's. With renice 19 nobody notices (except for casefans that go 100%
something similar happened here in Belgium, but with bottles for beverages: They introduced a tax on non-recyclable bottles (some 10 cent I think), but after one year, they got rid of this tax. Why? Because a lot of people were just buying their stuff in other countries (Belgium is really small, you are in another country fast if you want to).
If people go buy their stuff across the border to save some euro's, imagine what they will do to save several tens or hundreds of euros...
Since we have a computerstore at home, at 30 kilometers from the border with the netherlands, I will not complain if they push this tax through. Gotta order some more ipods now though, have to go...
You need massive amounts of matter/energy piled together to produce a natural black hole, one that collapses under it's own weight and becomes a singularity. You can however "force" matter to become so close that the local density is big enough to become singular. Smashing them together at incredible speeds seems to be a way to accomplish this.
Compare this with a hydrogen bomb: You need a lot of hydrogen on a pile to achieve fusion (the weight of our sun seems to do) but if you put a few grams inside the core of an atomic bomb you get some sort of forced fusion, although not stable and very short.
I have a trust spacecam, a very cheapo thingy. I removed this IR filter and reassembled the entire thing within 2 minutes. Didn't put a visible light filter in though. :)
Because I don't immediately have a remote control lying around here we are smoking cigarettes in the dark to generate IR light, with the cam on. Very cool effect! Very scary faces when taking a puff...
Nope, it's usually like "Watch out!" or "Did you see that truck" or
Ok, you are correct. Since such programs do compile I thought there was no problem, but this is indeed a bug after all. Thanks for pointing this out, I will change my sig immediately ;)
You are correct in every way, but I think these days the social aspect plays a big role, and people forget about this. Science is not "cool", nerds get picked on, ... Science should be made more "sexy". Back in my school, a lot of people really liked science, but just were afraid to show this, being scared to be rejected by the rest of the group/people.
main can be void. It is just the shell that expects a program to return an int on exit, but the shell takes a default value for this if the program doesn't return this value. If you run my sig, it will not really return to your shell :)
PS anyone stupid enough to actually try what happens if you run the program, don't forget to include unistd.h
If this is true, how comes that any program works anyway? If I write a simulation it is of the order a few thousand lines, but I cannot afford ONE bug in there. Publishing wrong results is not something I would like to do. This of course takes a lot of time, testing and debugging. But to put 30 bugs in each 1000 lines, have it to compile and run cleanly, and then even produce results that somehow hide the obviousness of these bugs and errors must be quite difficult. Anyone an idea of what sort of "bugs" we are talking about here?
Yup that is definitely true. Here in Belgium more than 60% of all cars sold have diesel-engines. The modern diesel-engines of today even have more power and efficiency than all other. I.e. my own car has a 1.7 diesel engine, 90 pk, but only uses 5 liters for 100 km.
PS: I do not speak english natively, so please do not start ranting about possible errors in the above
Bob The Belgian
- Doestn't repeat itself for a very long time
- Doesn't have a distinct distribution if you plot them in an N-dimensional space relative to their rank-number (plot number x with value y on axis x modulo N for instance).
There are however several disadvantages: You can easily recreate the sequence when you know the seed, there is always a maximum N whereafter there will be a distinct distribution, and these algorithms often are slow. Now a fast hardware-random number generator could solve all these problems: Your numbers are REALLY ALWAYS random. And this cannot be too difficult to make I guess, since a lot of quantummechanical effects you can observe in electronics are inherently random.
I don't think it would even be very difficult to adjust certain existing bank transfer protocols to excange messages (instead of money) between email-accounts (special registered accounts of course) and keep track of these transfers (and use quota or charge people). We could build a brand new "secure mail infrastructure" ;)
Or we can make another email-service (-protocol) next to the already existing one, but one that charges you to use it. I would gladly pay a few cents/dollars each month to avoid spam (it takes a lot of my time sifting through all this junk every day).
But regarding the water: first of all it requires a lot of energy to make H2 out of water, so existence of H2O does not imply existence of H2 in large amounts. Second of all, liquid water boils immediately at those pressures and temperatures. So the water probably boiled away when the atmosphere became thinner or is locked somewhere in solid form.
1. all of the cards volume is used in the same way, to store data
2. the card actually holds 2 terabytes of data, not just 2 TB adressing
3. They can design and built 3D circuits and chips, not just layered 2D-chips as most others use
results in a byte-density of approx. 38 gigabytes per cubic millimeter. To accomplish this you will need to fit the circuitry and electrical components needed to store 300 bits in a cubic micrometer!
This is A LOT and doesn't seem realistic to me, at least not for the near future.