The article didn't say who did the research, but I'm pretty sure that this was done by the CS department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). I've seen some "zebra barcode" images up on their campus. Here's the link to their "Images of Research" page (along with a picture of the zebras:
I did a similar thing back in grade school. I figured out that on the old Apple Macintosh LCII's, after you formatted a floppy disk, you could manually set the reported capacity to whatever you wanted and the system would see it at that size until you attempted to write more than the disk could hold. I told a friend about this and he started buying 3.5" floppies off of me for $5 a piece and selling them to our classmates as "MACorvettes" for $10-$20. He got caught and got suspended. I denied everything and enjoyed my cash.
I guess that depends on your definition of "observable", since it was Darwin's observations that species that had left the mainland had evolved into new species that were better adapted to their new environment. We have observed hundreds of human and pre-human skeletons showing an evolution over a period of a million years from chimpanzees to modern humans. Countless other observations have been made. We have even recently observed that bacteria, when selective pressure (antibiotics) is applied, they tend to evolve (ie, "superbugs").
Not repeatable?
Again, lab experiments have shown this time and again. Take two bacterial colonies, start turning up the heat over a number of generations and you'll eventually have two separate colonies of thermophiles. In the wild, convergent evolution has been seen a number of times. The textbook example are birds and bats. They belong to different classes (mammalian vs avian) and from the fossil record, we know that the wings developed after the species split off, but both creatures have very similar wing structure.
I might not be able to tell you exactly how this will benefit you, but in general more knowledge is never a bad thing. Consider the huge number of products and ideas that we use everyday that came from accidents or people just playing around (rubber, penicillin, and superglue, to name a few).
War, on the other hand, serves no creative purpose, but only destroys. I would ask you how we can continue to justify several different military actions during a recession.
One more thing: first, consider NASA's budget which is 0.6% of the federal budget. Now consider the Department of Defense's budget, which is 19%. (Both of these numbers are straight from Wikipedia for 2010.) I can't justify spending 32 times as much on wars that will only serve to kill people and create a worldwide hatred of America as we spend on our space program. It doesn't make any sense to me.
One other thing - we won't hit a wall with storage either, since, to quote Feynman, there's plenty of room at the bottom. We're several generations away from getting to storage that relies on one atom per bit, but even once we're there, there are a ton of things to manipulate. Specifically, manipulating the spin states of the valence electrons should be able to allow us to keep increasing the storage density for a few generations longer. Then, there are the core electrons, protons, quarks, etc.
The next 50 years is going to be awesome as we start getting devices that are truly quantum mechanical in nature.
We didn't hit a 4GHz wall - we hit a 4GHz hill. There is one Sandy Bridge processor that gets to 3.9GHz in Turbo mode and over the next year as faster chips are put out, we'll see them slip past 4GHz. AMD has been hinting that at least one Bulldozer Zambezi will come at above 4GHz and even if not, those chips will eventually be released at above 4GHz. The point is that there are challenges to getting the clock speed up so high, but as long as people want faster computers, somebody will figure out how to do it. So far Intel and AMD are still managing to go even faster using silicon. Other companies are looking at other materials. Clock speeds quadrupled in the last decade; they might not do that this decade, but they certainly will at least double.
As for transfer speeds, you can always double your transfer speed by adding another lane. SSDs basically do that already. The underlying flash memory is as slow as ever, but these 600MB/s drives get those speeds by writing to lots of memory cells simultaneously.
Except that Chinese university students tend to (and I know I'm over-generalizing here) want to come to the USA for their post-graduate education. China can grow and educate, but as long as they have a repressive, over-controlling government, the brains are going to be leaving, not entering.
Both of the Australia stories on the front page today are both reasons I turned down a job offer to work in Sydney. As an American, the idea that the government would get a say in which video games I play seemed ridiculous, as did the idea that Internet access would be handled by a closed monopoly.
I'm not saying that the USA is whole lot better, but I do have the option of playing the original Manhunt and downloading the latest Ubuntu image without any bandwidth cap.
I wish that countries would keep in mind that there are competitive advantages to keeping their systems more open and that it's not just about protecting the children. In my case, an Australian employer lost out on an employee they wanted because their government was busy playing censor.
Just because we haven't had a big quake recently, doesn't make it more likely. Just the same as how losing 20 games of blackjack makes you no more or less likely to win the 21st.
Or cafe X will see an uptick in business as their tables turn quicker. Either way, it's the free market economy at its best.
(Side note: this only works because in a place like NYC, there is a lot of competition. If you lived in a small town with only one coffeeshop, then this would be a completely different deal. (I'm looking at you Time Warner Cable.))
While I have to applaud Google for trying to keep their users' accounts safe, I have to say that this idea is really untenable. Not everyone has a cellphone, not everyone with a phone carries it all of the time, and you might not always have reception. Just this last summer, I had a month-long internship in Nebraska. The town I stayed at had zero reception on Sprint's network and the nearest cell tower was over an hour away. So, for the entire month, I was without a phone. And last February, I was in Switzerland, where again, I had no cell service.
Furthermore, if my bank can authenticate me without requiring an SMS, then certainly my email provider can do the same.
I want to know why Obama hasn't closed the damn place yet. One of the major reasons I voted democratic in the last presidential election was to put an end to this sort of thing.
Considering that AMD's Bulldozer is coming out in May (most likely), it might make more sense, if you haven't already bought Sandy Bridge, to wait and see how AMD's chips stack up.
For some products, sure there are alternatives. But what about for BluRay? HDDVD is dead and Netflix streaming is not high-definition.
Or what about TV and movies? Sony Pictures is behind the Spiderman movies, Jeopardy!, Beakman's World, Shark Tank, The Social Network, Ghostbusters, and countless other films and shows.
Yeah, I think the only thing that Sony has done wrong is remove the "Other OS" option. They probably should not have included it in the first place. But other than that, Sony has basically sold you:
-A black box capable of playing games -You have to pay $60 per new game -If you want to play online, you can't cheat
This firmware doesn't change any of this, so why get upset? If you wanted a general purpose computer that you control the software stack on, then buy a PC and roll your own Linux kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
The article didn't say who did the research, but I'm pretty sure that this was done by the CS department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). I've seen some "zebra barcode" images up on their campus. Here's the link to their "Images of Research" page (along with a picture of the zebras:
http://grad.uic.edu/cms/?pid=1000950
I did a similar thing back in grade school. I figured out that on the old Apple Macintosh LCII's, after you formatted a floppy disk, you could manually set the reported capacity to whatever you wanted and the system would see it at that size until you attempted to write more than the disk could hold. I told a friend about this and he started buying 3.5" floppies off of me for $5 a piece and selling them to our classmates as "MACorvettes" for $10-$20. He got caught and got suspended. I denied everything and enjoyed my cash.
+1 Funny
Not observable?
I guess that depends on your definition of "observable", since it was Darwin's observations that species that had left the mainland had evolved into new species that were better adapted to their new environment. We have observed hundreds of human and pre-human skeletons showing an evolution over a period of a million years from chimpanzees to modern humans. Countless other observations have been made. We have even recently observed that bacteria, when selective pressure (antibiotics) is applied, they tend to evolve (ie, "superbugs").
Not repeatable?
Again, lab experiments have shown this time and again. Take two bacterial colonies, start turning up the heat over a number of generations and you'll eventually have two separate colonies of thermophiles. In the wild, convergent evolution has been seen a number of times. The textbook example are birds and bats. They belong to different classes (mammalian vs avian) and from the fossil record, we know that the wings developed after the species split off, but both creatures have very similar wing structure.
Fleas? Puppies? That sounds like a dog analogy.
This is Slashdot. We do car analogies here. Let me help:
"Yeah, problem is that if Microsoft is a sports car, it's a sports car with a hell of a lot of check engine lights on."
I might not be able to tell you exactly how this will benefit you, but in general more knowledge is never a bad thing. Consider the huge number of products and ideas that we use everyday that came from accidents or people just playing around (rubber, penicillin, and superglue, to name a few).
War, on the other hand, serves no creative purpose, but only destroys. I would ask you how we can continue to justify several different military actions during a recession.
One more thing: first, consider NASA's budget which is 0.6% of the federal budget. Now consider the Department of Defense's budget, which is 19%. (Both of these numbers are straight from Wikipedia for 2010.) I can't justify spending 32 times as much on wars that will only serve to kill people and create a worldwide hatred of America as we spend on our space program. It doesn't make any sense to me.
granted salt water and steel wire mix like spaghetti and tuna fish
Yum! That's a great lunch idea!
It doesn't beg the question. It RAISES the question.
You must be new here...
Mod parent +1 Punny.
One other thing - we won't hit a wall with storage either, since, to quote Feynman, there's plenty of room at the bottom. We're several generations away from getting to storage that relies on one atom per bit, but even once we're there, there are a ton of things to manipulate. Specifically, manipulating the spin states of the valence electrons should be able to allow us to keep increasing the storage density for a few generations longer. Then, there are the core electrons, protons, quarks, etc.
The next 50 years is going to be awesome as we start getting devices that are truly quantum mechanical in nature.
We didn't hit a 4GHz wall - we hit a 4GHz hill. There is one Sandy Bridge processor that gets to 3.9GHz in Turbo mode and over the next year as faster chips are put out, we'll see them slip past 4GHz. AMD has been hinting that at least one Bulldozer Zambezi will come at above 4GHz and even if not, those chips will eventually be released at above 4GHz. The point is that there are challenges to getting the clock speed up so high, but as long as people want faster computers, somebody will figure out how to do it. So far Intel and AMD are still managing to go even faster using silicon. Other companies are looking at other materials. Clock speeds quadrupled in the last decade; they might not do that this decade, but they certainly will at least double.
As for transfer speeds, you can always double your transfer speed by adding another lane. SSDs basically do that already. The underlying flash memory is as slow as ever, but these 600MB/s drives get those speeds by writing to lots of memory cells simultaneously.
The FF popup will be on top of any page content. So the malicious website can try this, but it won't be visible.
Except that Chinese university students tend to (and I know I'm over-generalizing here) want to come to the USA for their post-graduate education. China can grow and educate, but as long as they have a repressive, over-controlling government, the brains are going to be leaving, not entering.
Both of the Australia stories on the front page today are both reasons I turned down a job offer to work in Sydney. As an American, the idea that the government would get a say in which video games I play seemed ridiculous, as did the idea that Internet access would be handled by a closed monopoly.
I'm not saying that the USA is whole lot better, but I do have the option of playing the original Manhunt and downloading the latest Ubuntu image without any bandwidth cap.
I wish that countries would keep in mind that there are competitive advantages to keeping their systems more open and that it's not just about protecting the children. In my case, an Australian employer lost out on an employee they wanted because their government was busy playing censor.
"the increasing likeliness of a 'big' quake"
Just because we haven't had a big quake recently, doesn't make it more likely. Just the same as how losing 20 games of blackjack makes you no more or less likely to win the 21st.
It's just a tasteful, nude background on his desktop. Nothing that should warrant a removal by YouTube, but it's their prudish prerogative.
For those of us who are adults and capable of seeing a female breast without going nuts, here's an alternate link to the video:
http://blip.tv/file/4790125
Or cafe X will see an uptick in business as their tables turn quicker. Either way, it's the free market economy at its best.
(Side note: this only works because in a place like NYC, there is a lot of competition. If you lived in a small town with only one coffeeshop, then this would be a completely different deal. (I'm looking at you Time Warner Cable.))
... which is always the problem with so called "democracy". Choose between the idiot on the left or the idiot on the right of the ballot.
The problem is our particular form of democracy, which encourages a two party system. Democracy, in general, is a wonderful thing.
While I have to applaud Google for trying to keep their users' accounts safe, I have to say that this idea is really untenable. Not everyone has a cellphone, not everyone with a phone carries it all of the time, and you might not always have reception. Just this last summer, I had a month-long internship in Nebraska. The town I stayed at had zero reception on Sprint's network and the nearest cell tower was over an hour away. So, for the entire month, I was without a phone. And last February, I was in Switzerland, where again, I had no cell service.
Furthermore, if my bank can authenticate me without requiring an SMS, then certainly my email provider can do the same.
Yeah, it sounds like a good excuse for big pharma to give us all autism!
(I'm joking, by the way.)
I want to know why Obama hasn't closed the damn place yet. One of the major reasons I voted democratic in the last presidential election was to put an end to this sort of thing.
Considering that AMD's Bulldozer is coming out in May (most likely), it might make more sense, if you haven't already bought Sandy Bridge, to wait and see how AMD's chips stack up.
Why are we making fun of people for not knowing what the Internet was 17 years ago when the /. summary doesn't even capitalize it properly?
For some products, sure there are alternatives. But what about for BluRay? HDDVD is dead and Netflix streaming is not high-definition.
Or what about TV and movies? Sony Pictures is behind the Spiderman movies, Jeopardy!, Beakman's World, Shark Tank, The Social Network, Ghostbusters, and countless other films and shows.
I'm sorry, but a boycott just isn't practical.
Yeah, I think the only thing that Sony has done wrong is remove the "Other OS" option. They probably should not have included it in the first place. But other than that, Sony has basically sold you:
-A black box capable of playing games
-You have to pay $60 per new game
-If you want to play online, you can't cheat
This firmware doesn't change any of this, so why get upset? If you wanted a general purpose computer that you control the software stack on, then buy a PC and roll your own Linux kernel.