I'm no software engineer, but it seems like a lot of the issue in designing for multiple cores is being able to turn large tasks into many independent discrete operations that can be processed in tandem. But it seems that some tasks lend themselves to that compartmentalization and some don't. If you have 1,000 half-gigahertz cores running a 3D simulation, you may be able to get 875 FPS out of Doom X at 1920x1440, but what about the processes that are slow and plodding and sequential? How do those get sped up if you're opting for more cores instead of more cycles?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
> what is a grue?
The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.
It's interesting... I took AP Computer Science in 11th grade and AP European History in 12th.
At the school I eventually graduated from, they'd fallen prey to the multiculturalism angle of political correctness, so though I got credits that counted toward the X credits needed to graduate for my AP European History exam, it didn't count toward my History requirement and I was forced to take "World History" (which was 80% stuff I covered in AP European History and 20% covering the rest of the world).
On the other hand, this school let you take a Computer Science course to satisfy the Math requirement, so my AP Computer Science score made it possible for me to graduate college without ever taking a Math class (not even Stats).
The Palm 755p is running the same software on the same processor as the Palm 650, the 680p, the 700p, the 750p, and the Centro. They change the form factor a bit from model to model, but honestly, Palm hasn't had a really new idea in YEARS. With everyone out there competing to be the hottest new thing on the market, Palm just keeps treading water.
They haven't upgraded the goddamn processor in 4+ years!
I got a 750p and I like it, but when my contract comes up for renewal next year... not getting another Palm. Probably not sticking with this one. If Apple would do a bulkier iphone with a slide-out QWERTY keypad and a replaceable battery, I'd seriously consider them. But since that doesn't seem likely, I'll probably get a Blackberry.
Have compromised World of Warcraft accounts become such a serious problem, that OTPs are already neccesary for games?
Probably more like Blizzard has decided that people paranoid about having their accounts compromised have become such a serious market segment that it can eke out a few more pennies selling these dongles for 6 euros a pop.
If it was a huge problem, Blizzard would begin requiring them. The fact that they're optional means they're probably just a new way to sap a few more bucks from players who have invested so much of their time and being into this game that six euros seems a very reasonable security blanket.
Plain and simple, the only thing that's going to really make a dent in identity theft is to make identities harder to steal, and that means requiring all the banks and credit card companies to jump through more identity verification hoops before they give someone your money or a line of credit in your name.
Sure, requiring you to go to a licensed notary and have a credit card application notarized might not make it so easy to get credit, but it would also make it harder to get credit in your name.
The banks and credit card companies could do this, but it's more profitable to let people steal your identity and then just jack up fees and interest rates to cover the losses.
It's not so much any security measure, it's government intrusion and invasiveness that people object to. I mean, come on, if you take everyone who was ever killed by a terrorist attack involving an airplane in the history of flight and compare that to the number of people killed by tobacco, drunk drivers...
We're spending billions on airport security not because human life is so precious. If we were, we might invest some of that money in invasive laws and procedures to stop drunks from driving and tobacco addicts from smoking or dipping. We might spend some of it on inspecting more cargo containers, protecting our power grid better...
We're going overboard at the airports because it's really visible. Stepped up security around a Dow Chemical plant or a local reservoir barely gets noticed. But a new airport scanner that can count the hairs on your scrotum, and everyone goes nuts.
Let's get real, if the TSA operated with the confidence, efficiency, and appearance of intelligence that some other airport security services do, and maybe people might feel better about it. But you get the feeling that some of these security screeners are working for TSA because the private sector has no use for them. Stuff that shouldn't slip through regularly does, the security is like swiss cheese, and the TSA's answer to it is not to hire better staff or give them better training, it's to throw money behind more invasive technology.
That irks some people. Most of us wouldn't mind TSA doing its job if they could do it efficiently instead of making it look like one big scam on the American people.
Okay, first thing... the woman in the scanner looks like she's trying to keep a hula hoop in motion.
Second thing:
The scanners do a good job seeing under clothing but cannot see through plastic or rubber materials that resemble skin, said Peter Siegel, a senior scientist at the California Institute of Technology. "You probably could find very common materials that you could wrap around you that would effectively obscure things," Siegel said.
Wonder if it would be legal to sell a line of rubberized scan-proof lingerie?
"Auntie Mandy's No-Scan Panties: The TSA won't see your va-jay-jay today"
"Bodacious Ta's Rubber Bras: If the TSA wants to see your nipples, make 'em buy you dinner first."
"Mr. Happy's Super Sleeves: Take a 'tripod' through the TSA scanner."
Unless you just can't get cable or DSL, why go with WiMax? It's neat, but business grade cable or business grade DSL can give you 3-15 megabit speeds for prices that run less than your T1 line. Is there a reason your only options are a T1 or WiMax or are you limiting yourself.
When I was working at IMDb.com (the Internet Movie Database), I asked Col Needham (the founder and managing director) why they never released it as a book. His answer was that the database was constantly changing. With the lead time you had to give for the actual printing, by the time any book hit the shelves, it would be months out of date.
I think Wikipedia falls victim to the same problem. It might be a very good book and they might select the most stable entries, but like IMDb, Wikipedia is a living, breathing thing that grows and changes on a regular basis. In fact, that's part of its appeal. A book is basically just freezing a snapshot of selected articles in time, but how much does something where part of its value is in its dynamic nature lose from being frozen like that?
Some of the machines that said "vista capable" were, some were barely capable. But they've been downplaying the minimum requirements forever. If you had a system with the minimum requirements for XP, it ran like a dog. Did people expect that buying something with the minimum requirements for Vista would generate better results?
In the end, I think some entertainment might come out of the trial, but the financial award will end up being little more than a slap on the wrist to Microsoft. Time will tell.
According to this video that's almost 10 times farther than a person could walk on a gallon of gasoline... if a person could metabolize gasoline, of course.
It cannot be an assault if the robot is acting autonomously. So it could be an industrial accident caused by a runaway machine.
When hasn't a court held a machine's owner at least civilly if not criminally liable for a runaway machine... especially if there was any way to reasonably think that XYZ could happen and they did not take all reasonable measures to prevent that?
35,500 employees and thousands of local contractors (like me) who buy homes in Washington and pay property taxes on them or who rent living accomodations from people who pay property taxes on those structures.
35,500 employees and thousands of local contractors (like me) who pump maybe two billion dollars a year of consumer spending into the state's economy, much of it subject to sales taxes of 8.5% or more.
- Each voter submits an electronic vote.
- They encrypt their private information with a private key, and append this to their vote to form a "voting record".
- A public database gathers all the voting records and tallies them. For simplicity, voters are verified vs the voter rolls non-anonymously, and their votes are made anonymous when uploaded to the main database. This is basically how it is done now with paper votes.
This assumes a certain level of technical competence (note I didn't say "expertise", just simple competence) on the part of the voter and the poll-workers who would have to assist them. When most of the people who turn out to vote and who man the polls are senior citizens, you need to come up with a "voting for dummies" system. For example, make their private key a hash of biometric indicators such as a thumbprint or retinal scan or both.
Of course, you have to have alternate voting methods for people without thumbs or retinas.
And if we're going to do things like they do in some other countries (as some posters have recommended), let's fine the eligible voters who don't vote (like they do in Australia).
Too bad we aren't going to see any speed close to that for personal use, at least not without forking over hefty sacks of bling.
Yeah. Comcast is bitching and moaning about bandwidth usage at current speeds and doing all sorts of dirty stuff to "shape" usage. If they increase speeds by 15-20x, their wailing and gnashing of teeth will know no end (or upper decibel level).
On the consumer side, they'll probably roll out speeds and pricing only comparable to FIOS and not get anywhere near the higher end speeds at all, or they'll offer 50-100 megabit speeds on business accounts for $200-300 a month.
Still, Verizon just made FIOS available in my neighborhood. I was waiting to see if they'd roll out FIOS TV too and get the package (dump Comcast altogether). Now I may wait to see if Comcast rolls out the new speedy stuff around here to compete with FIOS in the near future. Could be worth the wait.
When it came time for me to buy a new machine, and I was dead set against another Windows box, I bought a Mac. It gave me the best of both worlds. I get most of the best non-GUI Linux packages (or at least most of the best) via the BSD ports collection, a number of Linux GUI packages with Apple's X interface, great integration of virtualized Windows applications with Parallels, all the Mac specific software, and the Apple store is a 5-minute drive away if I need more help than I can get online.
I can run Linux in Bootcamp or Parallels, so if I really want something only Linux can deliver, I can have that too.
Mac is sort of the "universal platform", IMO, and a year later, I consider it a very worthwhile investment.
Not commercially. I was a video salesperson (TV, VCR. Camcorder) at Circuit City from and we were still waiting for consumer DVD players to hit the market when I quit in 1996.
They're not planning to hit 1TB until 2011. With all the companies in the storage race, I don't see this horizon representing any special accomplishment. It's a neat way of doing things, but so are some of the other contenders in the race.
What I wonder about is the archival quality of their material. How long before it oxidizes or otherwise brittles itself into uselessness? I remember when everyone was saying that CDs would last forever, unlike cassette tapes, and then we found out that CDs were not eternal. Their plastic might take forever to biodegrade, but their data integrity would degrade within 10-15 years. So, even if this turns out to be the winner in the race to a Terabyte disc, how long will it maintain data integrity for archival purposes?
It may seem like a joke, but basically the NCAA's position is "you guys are great until you start costing us sponsors or licensing revenue, then you're a nuisance," which is basically how rabid fans fans are treated by bands, sports teams, etc.
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I'm no software engineer, but it seems like a lot of the issue in designing for multiple cores is being able to turn large tasks into many independent discrete operations that can be processed in tandem. But it seems that some tasks lend themselves to that compartmentalization and some don't. If you have 1,000 half-gigahertz cores running a 3D simulation, you may be able to get 875 FPS out of Doom X at 1920x1440, but what about the processes that are slow and plodding and sequential? How do those get sped up if you're opting for more cores instead of more cycles?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
> what is a grue?
The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.
640 Kilobits should be fast enough for anyone.
It's interesting... I took AP Computer Science in 11th grade and AP European History in 12th.
At the school I eventually graduated from, they'd fallen prey to the multiculturalism angle of political correctness, so though I got credits that counted toward the X credits needed to graduate for my AP European History exam, it didn't count toward my History requirement and I was forced to take "World History" (which was 80% stuff I covered in AP European History and 20% covering the rest of the world).
On the other hand, this school let you take a Computer Science course to satisfy the Math requirement, so my AP Computer Science score made it possible for me to graduate college without ever taking a Math class (not even Stats).
- Greg
The Palm 755p is running the same software on the same processor as the Palm 650, the 680p, the 700p, the 750p, and the Centro. They change the form factor a bit from model to model, but honestly, Palm hasn't had a really new idea in YEARS. With everyone out there competing to be the hottest new thing on the market, Palm just keeps treading water.
They haven't upgraded the goddamn processor in 4+ years!
I got a 750p and I like it, but when my contract comes up for renewal next year... not getting another Palm. Probably not sticking with this one. If Apple would do a bulkier iphone with a slide-out QWERTY keypad and a replaceable battery, I'd seriously consider them. But since that doesn't seem likely, I'll probably get a Blackberry.
Probably more like Blizzard has decided that people paranoid about having their accounts compromised have become such a serious market segment that it can eke out a few more pennies selling these dongles for 6 euros a pop.
If it was a huge problem, Blizzard would begin requiring them. The fact that they're optional means they're probably just a new way to sap a few more bucks from players who have invested so much of their time and being into this game that six euros seems a very reasonable security blanket.
Plain and simple, the only thing that's going to really make a dent in identity theft is to make identities harder to steal, and that means requiring all the banks and credit card companies to jump through more identity verification hoops before they give someone your money or a line of credit in your name.
Sure, requiring you to go to a licensed notary and have a credit card application notarized might not make it so easy to get credit, but it would also make it harder to get credit in your name.
The banks and credit card companies could do this, but it's more profitable to let people steal your identity and then just jack up fees and interest rates to cover the losses.
- Greg
It's not so much any security measure, it's government intrusion and invasiveness that people object to. I mean, come on, if you take everyone who was ever killed by a terrorist attack involving an airplane in the history of flight and compare that to the number of people killed by tobacco, drunk drivers...
We're spending billions on airport security not because human life is so precious. If we were, we might invest some of that money in invasive laws and procedures to stop drunks from driving and tobacco addicts from smoking or dipping. We might spend some of it on inspecting more cargo containers, protecting our power grid better...
We're going overboard at the airports because it's really visible. Stepped up security around a Dow Chemical plant or a local reservoir barely gets noticed. But a new airport scanner that can count the hairs on your scrotum, and everyone goes nuts.
Let's get real, if the TSA operated with the confidence, efficiency, and appearance of intelligence that some other airport security services do, and maybe people might feel better about it. But you get the feeling that some of these security screeners are working for TSA because the private sector has no use for them. Stuff that shouldn't slip through regularly does, the security is like swiss cheese, and the TSA's answer to it is not to hire better staff or give them better training, it's to throw money behind more invasive technology.
That irks some people. Most of us wouldn't mind TSA doing its job if they could do it efficiently instead of making it look like one big scam on the American people.
- Greg
Second thing:
Wonder if it would be legal to sell a line of rubberized scan-proof lingerie?
"Auntie Mandy's No-Scan Panties: The TSA won't see your va-jay-jay today"
"Bodacious Ta's Rubber Bras: If the TSA wants to see your nipples, make 'em buy you dinner first."
"Mr. Happy's Super Sleeves: Take a 'tripod' through the TSA scanner."
- Greg
Unless you just can't get cable or DSL, why go with WiMax? It's neat, but business grade cable or business grade DSL can give you 3-15 megabit speeds for prices that run less than your T1 line. Is there a reason your only options are a T1 or WiMax or are you limiting yourself.
- Greg
When I was working at IMDb.com (the Internet Movie Database), I asked Col Needham (the founder and managing director) why they never released it as a book. His answer was that the database was constantly changing. With the lead time you had to give for the actual printing, by the time any book hit the shelves, it would be months out of date.
I think Wikipedia falls victim to the same problem. It might be a very good book and they might select the most stable entries, but like IMDb, Wikipedia is a living, breathing thing that grows and changes on a regular basis. In fact, that's part of its appeal. A book is basically just freezing a snapshot of selected articles in time, but how much does something where part of its value is in its dynamic nature lose from being frozen like that?
- Greg
I wonder, though, how much this will really cost.
Some of the machines that said "vista capable" were, some were barely capable. But they've been downplaying the minimum requirements forever. If you had a system with the minimum requirements for XP, it ran like a dog. Did people expect that buying something with the minimum requirements for Vista would generate better results?
In the end, I think some entertainment might come out of the trial, but the financial award will end up being little more than a slap on the wrist to Microsoft. Time will tell.
- Greg
Sorry... This Video. I was changing my .sig and didn't realize that URL was on the clipboard. I'm a dumbass.
According to this video that's almost 10 times farther than a person could walk on a gallon of gasoline... if a person could metabolize gasoline, of course.
- Greg
It cannot be an assault if the robot is acting autonomously. So it could be an industrial accident caused by a runaway machine.
When hasn't a court held a machine's owner at least civilly if not criminally liable for a runaway machine... especially if there was any way to reasonably think that XYZ could happen and they did not take all reasonable measures to prevent that?
35,500 employees and thousands of local contractors (like me) who buy homes in Washington and pay property taxes on them or who rent living accomodations from people who pay property taxes on those structures.
35,500 employees and thousands of local contractors (like me) who pump maybe two billion dollars a year of consumer spending into the state's economy, much of it subject to sales taxes of 8.5% or more.
I'd actually like to read the judge's ruling instead of people summarising Dozier's crowing about it!
- Each voter submits an electronic vote.
- They encrypt their private information with a private key, and append this to their vote to form a "voting record".
- A public database gathers all the voting records and tallies them. For simplicity, voters are verified vs the voter rolls non-anonymously, and their votes are made anonymous when uploaded to the main database. This is basically how it is done now with paper votes.
This assumes a certain level of technical competence (note I didn't say "expertise", just simple competence) on the part of the voter and the poll-workers who would have to assist them. When most of the people who turn out to vote and who man the polls are senior citizens, you need to come up with a "voting for dummies" system. For example, make their private key a hash of biometric indicators such as a thumbprint or retinal scan or both.
Of course, you have to have alternate voting methods for people without thumbs or retinas.
And if we're going to do things like they do in some other countries (as some posters have recommended), let's fine the eligible voters who don't vote (like they do in Australia).
- Greg
Too bad we aren't going to see any speed close to that for personal use, at least not without forking over hefty sacks of bling.
Yeah. Comcast is bitching and moaning about bandwidth usage at current speeds and doing all sorts of dirty stuff to "shape" usage. If they increase speeds by 15-20x, their wailing and gnashing of teeth will know no end (or upper decibel level).
On the consumer side, they'll probably roll out speeds and pricing only comparable to FIOS and not get anywhere near the higher end speeds at all, or they'll offer 50-100 megabit speeds on business accounts for $200-300 a month.
Still, Verizon just made FIOS available in my neighborhood. I was waiting to see if they'd roll out FIOS TV too and get the package (dump Comcast altogether). Now I may wait to see if Comcast rolls out the new speedy stuff around here to compete with FIOS in the near future. Could be worth the wait.
- Greg
When it came time for me to buy a new machine, and I was dead set against another Windows box, I bought a Mac. It gave me the best of both worlds. I get most of the best non-GUI Linux packages (or at least most of the best) via the BSD ports collection, a number of Linux GUI packages with Apple's X interface, great integration of virtualized Windows applications with Parallels, all the Mac specific software, and the Apple store is a 5-minute drive away if I need more help than I can get online.
I can run Linux in Bootcamp or Parallels, so if I really want something only Linux can deliver, I can have that too.
Mac is sort of the "universal platform", IMO, and a year later, I consider it a very worthwhile investment.
Greg
Dude.... The DVD has been around since 1993-94.
Not commercially. I was a video salesperson (TV, VCR. Camcorder) at Circuit City from and we were still waiting for consumer DVD players to hit the market when I quit in 1996.
- Greg
They're not planning to hit 1TB until 2011. With all the companies in the storage race, I don't see this horizon representing any special accomplishment. It's a neat way of doing things, but so are some of the other contenders in the race.
What I wonder about is the archival quality of their material. How long before it oxidizes or otherwise brittles itself into uselessness? I remember when everyone was saying that CDs would last forever, unlike cassette tapes, and then we found out that CDs were not eternal. Their plastic might take forever to biodegrade, but their data integrity would degrade within 10-15 years. So, even if this turns out to be the winner in the race to a Terabyte disc, how long will it maintain data integrity for archival purposes?
- Greg
It may seem like a joke, but basically the NCAA's position is "you guys are great until you start costing us sponsors or licensing revenue, then you're a nuisance," which is basically how rabid fans fans are treated by bands, sports teams, etc.
- Greg
My favorite law is what I call Pratchett's Law: "One-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten."
Damn shame about his recent Alzheimers diagnosis.
- Greg