Obviously Dr. Hawking will recover - he has not yet found a full Grand Unified Theory integrating quantum mechanics and gravity. That's the deal he made with Death - he gets to have that theory published before he dies.
A much better gambit than challenging The Grim Reaper to chess. Or Twister, even.
------- Seriously - get well soon sir, and keep on thinking free.
Yes, they are thinking about possibly being able to, at some point in the future, have the theoretical ability to create smart tattoos.
All they need to do is create an intelligent ink, that is bio-compatible, and that can be switched in color by some as-yet undeveloped method, along with some form of bio-compatible computer that could be implanted to control the ink, some bio-compatible means to connect the computer to the ink, some bio-compatible power source, and some way to interface to those components.
But hey, they have a cool picture of what it might look like, so that's good enough for a Slashdot entry.
OT: I have a really cool design for a transparent flying car that can fold up and fit into your pocket. I only have a couple of small issues to tackle, like a reactionless drive, a total-conversion power plant, and a magical^Wnanomaterial that can be rigid when it needs to be and yet can fold up very small, with almost no weight.
But I have a render of what it might look like here:
So, when do I get my front page article?
Sarcasm aside: when can we actually get a bit of critical thinking before these wishful fantasies get posted?
He may be a lawyer, but he doesn't understand who the consumers are in the newspaper model.
Newspapers, like much of modern media, sell audiences to advertisers.
I agree with what you are trying to say 100%, but there is a bit of a tweak I'd make to how you are saying it:
For any product, there are the consumers of the product, and there are the customers who buy it. Those two sets may have zero overlap.
The consumers of a product are the actual users.
The customers of a producer are the ones who actually pay for the product.
The producer is only motivated to keep the customers happy. The producer is only concerned about the consumers to the extent that the consumers are also the customers.
For example, why do many brands of dog food have artificial color added (especially red)? Dogs really don't care if their food is meat-colored or not - they only care that their food is meat-flavored and meat-scented. But dogs are only the consumers here, and the dog owners (customers) want their dogs' food to "look good".
Why does the post office make it so hard to get off the junk mail lists? Because while you, the postal patron, may be a consumer of their service, the bulk of their money comes from the third-class (junk) mailers - hence the junk mailers are the real customer here.
While IT techs may be the consumer of operating systems and programs, it is the PHBs who write the checks - the PHBs are the customer.
Coming back on topic - while we the readers may be the consumers of the product the news agencies create, we are NOT the customer. The advertisers are the ones who pay - they are the customers.
Once you start making that distinction the motivations of the parties involved becomes clearer.
And I'd add another observation to the mix:
Many people are saying that the value in the product is investigative reporting - hence bloggers and aggregators are not a replacement for the "old school" news agencies. And investigative reporting is expensive, so the argument is that aggregators need old-school news agencies.
How expensive is it for Google to get Street Views of the whole planet? How expensive is it for them to get high-res photos of the whole planet?
Does AP really think that Google couldn't fund some Real Journalists to do Real News reporting?
We are all biased - I'm biased, you are biased, he's biased. In and of itself, that doesn't have to be a bad thing - bias can be a hell of a motivator.
If $Journalist investigates $Politician because $Politician is a member of $Party and $Journalist thinks $Party are a bunch of crooks, and $Journalist's bias makes him keep digging until he finds something out and reports it, that is GOOD.
However, it is a question of reputation: If I know that $Journalist has a hate-on for $Party, I can weight what $Journalist write accordingly. If I know that $Journalist has a hate-on for $Party and lets that bias color his reporting, I can take that into account. If, on the other hand, I know that $Journalist has a hate-on for $Party, and as a result is especially scrupulous on his checking of his facts, I can take that into account as well.
If $Biased_as_Hell_website hires investigative reporters, but is careful not to spike stories from them just because it goes against their bias, then I might read them even if their bias goes against my own. But $Biased_as_Hell_website is going to have to PROVE to me, every day, that they are trying to keep their facts separate from their opinions. And if I get a whiff that they aren't, then I will ignore them from that moment onward.
And if $Journalist gets a reputation for ignoring "inconvenient facts", for going soft on his friends and hard on his foes, then I will blow him off as well.
And THAT is what is important - that these "New Media" types establish reputations I can use to judge their reporting. Be up-front with your bias - at least with DailyKos and Rush I know their biases, and can at least begin to apply a correction factor. But when somebody tries to pretend "Oh, me? I'm not biased, trust me" - I know they are lying to me, I just don't know in which direction to correct for it.
"Anything with a high breeding rate will suffer 99.9% losses- the remaining.1% will be partially resistant to the problem and replace itself in a single breeding season."
Of course, a mechanism for resistance has to be available for this to happen. It is rather difficult to imagine how a mosquito could become "resistant" to a laser - it can hardly evolve into being transparent, or fully reflective.
The only avenue for "resistance" would be to cease to be attracted to humans, and thus not be in the area where the laser system is running. That sounds like a win-win for both humans and mosquitoes.
It's rather the point of my rant that needing to use QEMU (which is what OpenEmbedded does), or having to build on the target, or anything like that is a bodge, and that the real solution is FIXING the broken files.
I appreciate your trying to help by pointing out QEMU, and I have, indeed, used that approach, but that is STILL not solving the problem.
To misquote George Orwell, "All architectures are equal, but some are more equal than others." PPC currently is pretty clean in GLIBC, while ARM is supported only by a "features" patch for glibc, and lots of things that get regularly beat upon under PPC don't get as much attention on ARM.
I assert that is part of the problem here: since cross compiling in general is hard, people don't do it, so less common platforms don't get built as often, so bugs and problems don't get found (let along fixed), so cross compiling on those platforms is hard, so they don't get cross compiled as often - close the feedback loop.
That's part of why I'd like to see it get to the point where a programmer working on $FOO can easily install cross compile environments for as many architectures as possible, even if he isn't planning on actually working in those environments, just so that he can at least insure what he is doing will BUILD in those environments.
I am all for anything that gets more diversity in the software landscape, and ARM based netbooks will do that. I just hope that drives the various entities - both companies like Canonical and individual Free Software package creators - to fix the damn cross-compilation issue.
I have spend the past couple of WEEKS trying to build a proper set of binutils, GCC (C and C++), and glibc to do cross-compiles to the Beagleboard: It is absolutely INSANE that I should have to build ON THE BEAGLEBOARD when I have a nice multicore machine here on my desktop, just because too many developers don't understand that HOSTCC does NOT always equal CC (that the computer compiling the code is not the same as the computer that will be running the code, to make it a bit clearer to those who have not done cross-compilation).
I've fought with OpenEmbedded, with no success - trying to build anything non-trivial just fails, and I've gotten tired of posting to the OE groups and getting the collective equivalent of an ass-scratching "Duh, I dunno, it works for me." or "Try pulling the latest (broken) code from the version control system, because we cannot be bothered to actually RELEASE anything."
And while the OMAP3 has some neat hardware (OpenGL ES 2.0 accelerator, DSP, etc.) actually GETTING THE CODE FROM TI TO COMPILE is a slog-fest itself.
Seriously: I *hope* things like this will help drive the clean-up of the code, but until Somebody Big (Canonical, Red Hat, IBM) gets on the issue of identifying the projects that don't cross-compile gracefully (I'M LOOKING AT YOU GLIBC) and helping the maintainers fix that, it is going to be difficult for the various software sources to make their apps available under That Which Is Not X86.
And what would Boxee be, pray tell? I went to the site, and all I see is a page that asks me to log in. No information on what Boxee would be - no "What is Boxee?" or "Information about Boxee" or "Why you should give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about Boxee".
It looks to me like the standard Web 2.0 "We are so tragically hip that we cannot see over our own pelvis, and if you don't know what we are by osmosis, then you are so terribly uncool we wouldn't want to deal with you anyway."
Then there's the little issue of the Boxee blog not having a link back to the main site - good web site design there guys. Yes, *I* know to edit the URL to get to the main site, but amazingly enough guys, there are people in this world who don't know that little trick (though I suppose they, too, fall into the "terribly uncool" group which with you would rather not be bothered).
And of course, neither the story submitter nor the <cough>editors[sic]<cough> could be bothered to actually link to any such explanation.
Oh well - my guess is that whatever Boxee is, it will follow the same trajectory most Web 2.0 objects follow, so perhaps when the inevitable "Boxee goes bust" story is posted on/. that may give some clues as to what the remains used to be.
How is this different from the already existing kernel VFS buffer store, other than for the repopulation at startup?
Could you not accomplish this much more simply by having a process read all the blocks in a given block device at startup, thus faulting everything into the kernel buffer cache?
Since this is venturing OT for this thread, I'll just ask this: Is there anybody I can contact to get on the list for this? I'd like to think I'd be a good test candidate....
email me, if you would be so kind, at wowbagger at (the company about which we are talking). net
Right now, while the software specs are pretty open, the hardware specs are under NDA - and as I said, basically you cannot buy CBE chips from IBM unless you are Sony or Mercury: IBM says the chip requires too much specialized support hardware to work.
SO MAKE A DAMN MODULE OUT OF IT!
Yes, IBM and Toshiba have really blown it on that regard.
Pretty good. I was about to leave SKTC to Pixius because of cost/speed, but then the line went to 1.5M and I lost my motivation to do so. You are correct - just because the RBOCs are bastards doesn't mean that all telcos are being irresponsible with the USF.
It would be really great that they are moving to a smaller process, (/me takes deep breath)
IF THEY WOULD SELL YOU THE DAMN THINGS!
Where I work, we approached them to try to buy Cell processors for our equipment: the SPUs would make dandy DSP replacements, and we really could use the closer coupling of the processors instead of having a bunch of DSPs and spending all our time schlepping data around.
IBM wouldn't sell us any modules, wouldn't let us design our own CPU board, nothing. They seem supremely uninterested in actually getting these out into the hands of anybody other than their own divisions and Sony.
HEY IBM! How about you guys release these in a MicroTCA formfactor, or as a module that can be integrated into a MicroTCA?
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously Dr. Hawking will recover - he has not yet found a full Grand Unified Theory integrating quantum mechanics and gravity. That's the deal he made with Death - he gets to have that theory published before he dies.
A much better gambit than challenging The Grim Reaper to chess. Or Twister, even.
-------
Seriously - get well soon sir, and keep on thinking free.
Yes, they are thinking about possibly being able to, at some point in the future, have the theoretical ability to create smart tattoos.
All they need to do is create an intelligent ink, that is bio-compatible, and that can be switched in color by some as-yet undeveloped method, along with some form of bio-compatible computer that could be implanted to control the ink, some bio-compatible means to connect the computer to the ink, some bio-compatible power source, and some way to interface to those components.
But hey, they have a cool picture of what it might look like, so that's good enough for a Slashdot entry.
OT: I have a really cool design for a transparent flying car that can fold up and fit into your pocket. I only have a couple of small issues to tackle, like a reactionless drive, a total-conversion power plant, and a magical^Wnanomaterial that can be rigid when it needs to be and yet can fold up very small, with almost no weight.
But I have a render of what it might look like here:
So, when do I get my front page article?
Sarcasm aside: when can we actually get a bit of critical thinking before these wishful fantasies get posted?
So, in order to use this product, I have to partially break it?
There is only one product that I have to partially break to use that I am OK with.
It isn't a phone.
I agree with what you are trying to say 100%, but there is a bit of a tweak I'd make to how you are saying it:
For any product, there are the consumers of the product, and there are the customers who buy it. Those two sets may have zero overlap.
The consumers of a product are the actual users.
The customers of a producer are the ones who actually pay for the product.
The producer is only motivated to keep the customers happy. The producer is only concerned about the consumers to the extent that the consumers are also the customers.
For example, why do many brands of dog food have artificial color added (especially red)? Dogs really don't care if their food is meat-colored or not - they only care that their food is meat-flavored and meat-scented. But dogs are only the consumers here, and the dog owners (customers) want their dogs' food to "look good".
Why does the post office make it so hard to get off the junk mail lists? Because while you, the postal patron, may be a consumer of their service, the bulk of their money comes from the third-class (junk) mailers - hence the junk mailers are the real customer here.
While IT techs may be the consumer of operating systems and programs, it is the PHBs who write the checks - the PHBs are the customer.
Coming back on topic - while we the readers may be the consumers of the product the news agencies create, we are NOT the customer. The advertisers are the ones who pay - they are the customers.
Once you start making that distinction the motivations of the parties involved becomes clearer.
And I'd add another observation to the mix:
Many people are saying that the value in the product is investigative reporting - hence bloggers and aggregators are not a replacement for the "old school" news agencies. And investigative reporting is expensive, so the argument is that aggregators need old-school news agencies.
How expensive is it for Google to get Street Views of the whole planet? How expensive is it for them to get high-res photos of the whole planet?
Does AP really think that Google couldn't fund some Real Journalists to do Real News reporting?
Take it to your local Rhino Liner shop, and have them cover it with the same stuff they use for pickup truck bed liners.
While the stuff is still curing, stick a chrome "sitting naked lady" from a mudflap on it.
We are all biased - I'm biased, you are biased, he's biased. In and of itself, that doesn't have to be a bad thing - bias can be a hell of a motivator.
If $Journalist investigates $Politician because $Politician is a member of $Party and $Journalist thinks $Party are a bunch of crooks, and $Journalist's bias makes him keep digging until he finds something out and reports it, that is GOOD.
However, it is a question of reputation: If I know that $Journalist has a hate-on for $Party, I can weight what $Journalist write accordingly. If I know that $Journalist has a hate-on for $Party and lets that bias color his reporting, I can take that into account. If, on the other hand, I know that $Journalist has a hate-on for $Party, and as a result is especially scrupulous on his checking of his facts, I can take that into account as well.
If $Biased_as_Hell_website hires investigative reporters, but is careful not to spike stories from them just because it goes against their bias, then I might read them even if their bias goes against my own. But $Biased_as_Hell_website is going to have to PROVE to me, every day, that they are trying to keep their facts separate from their opinions. And if I get a whiff that they aren't, then I will ignore them from that moment onward.
And if $Journalist gets a reputation for ignoring "inconvenient facts", for going soft on his friends and hard on his foes, then I will blow him off as well.
And THAT is what is important - that these "New Media" types establish reputations I can use to judge their reporting. Be up-front with your bias - at least with DailyKos and Rush I know their biases, and can at least begin to apply a correction factor. But when somebody tries to pretend "Oh, me? I'm not biased, trust me" - I know they are lying to me, I just don't know in which direction to correct for it.
You could have them monitor HF propagation beacons to track the effects of the new sunspot Solar Cycle on the ionosphere.
You could have them do balloon launches.
"Anything with a high breeding rate will suffer 99.9% losses- the remaining .1% will be partially resistant to the problem and replace itself in a single breeding season."
Of course, a mechanism for resistance has to be available for this to happen. It is rather difficult to imagine how a mosquito could become "resistant" to a laser - it can hardly evolve into being transparent, or fully reflective.
The only avenue for "resistance" would be to cease to be attracted to humans, and thus not be in the area where the laser system is running. That sounds like a win-win for both humans and mosquitoes.
It's rather the point of my rant that needing to use QEMU (which is what OpenEmbedded does), or having to build on the target, or anything like that is a bodge, and that the real solution is FIXING the broken files.
I appreciate your trying to help by pointing out QEMU, and I have, indeed, used that approach, but that is STILL not solving the problem.
I'd asked Riverbank that very question. I was told they were evaluating it, but would make no commitments either way just yet.
So, at least they are thinking about it.
To misquote George Orwell, "All architectures are equal, but some are more equal than others." PPC currently is pretty clean in GLIBC, while ARM is supported only by a "features" patch for glibc, and lots of things that get regularly beat upon under PPC don't get as much attention on ARM.
I assert that is part of the problem here: since cross compiling in general is hard, people don't do it, so less common platforms don't get built as often, so bugs and problems don't get found (let along fixed), so cross compiling on those platforms is hard, so they don't get cross compiled as often - close the feedback loop.
That's part of why I'd like to see it get to the point where a programmer working on $FOO can easily install cross compile environments for as many architectures as possible, even if he isn't planning on actually working in those environments, just so that he can at least insure what he is doing will BUILD in those environments.
I am all for anything that gets more diversity in the software landscape, and ARM based netbooks will do that. I just hope that drives the various entities - both companies like Canonical and individual Free Software package creators - to fix the damn cross-compilation issue.
I have spend the past couple of WEEKS trying to build a proper set of binutils, GCC (C and C++), and glibc to do cross-compiles to the Beagleboard: It is absolutely INSANE that I should have to build ON THE BEAGLEBOARD when I have a nice multicore machine here on my desktop, just because too many developers don't understand that HOSTCC does NOT always equal CC (that the computer compiling the code is not the same as the computer that will be running the code, to make it a bit clearer to those who have not done cross-compilation).
I've fought with OpenEmbedded, with no success - trying to build anything non-trivial just fails, and I've gotten tired of posting to the OE groups and getting the collective equivalent of an ass-scratching "Duh, I dunno, it works for me." or "Try pulling the latest (broken) code from the version control system, because we cannot be bothered to actually RELEASE anything."
And while the OMAP3 has some neat hardware (OpenGL ES 2.0 accelerator, DSP, etc.) actually GETTING THE CODE FROM TI TO COMPILE is a slog-fest itself.
Seriously: I *hope* things like this will help drive the clean-up of the code, but until Somebody Big (Canonical, Red Hat, IBM) gets on the issue of identifying the projects that don't cross-compile gracefully (I'M LOOKING AT YOU GLIBC) and helping the maintainers fix that, it is going to be difficult for the various software sources to make their apps available under That Which Is Not X86.
And what would Boxee be, pray tell? I went to the site, and all I see is a page that asks me to log in. No information on what Boxee would be - no "What is Boxee?" or "Information about Boxee" or "Why you should give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about Boxee".
It looks to me like the standard Web 2.0 "We are so tragically hip that we cannot see over our own pelvis, and if you don't know what we are by osmosis, then you are so terribly uncool we wouldn't want to deal with you anyway."
Then there's the little issue of the Boxee blog not having a link back to the main site - good web site design there guys. Yes, *I* know to edit the URL to get to the main site, but amazingly enough guys, there are people in this world who don't know that little trick (though I suppose they, too, fall into the "terribly uncool" group which with you would rather not be bothered).
And of course, neither the story submitter nor the <cough>editors[sic]<cough> could be bothered to actually link to any such explanation.
Oh well - my guess is that whatever Boxee is, it will follow the same trajectory most Web 2.0 objects follow, so perhaps when the inevitable "Boxee goes bust" story is posted on /. that may give some clues as to what the remains used to be.
I wonder what effect this will have on the Alltel commercials: The Verizon kid is the nastiest, most obnoxious of the lot.
</humor>
How is this different from the already existing kernel VFS buffer store, other than for the repopulation at startup?
Could you not accomplish this much more simply by having a process read all the blocks in a given block device at startup, thus faulting everything into the kernel buffer cache?
Sorry, but I am using the text-only theme, and the Flash is STILL there. Of course, Adblock Plus and Flashblock took care of that, but....
The spammers are cashing in on the buzz around this project: I've been getting V!@9r@ spam for "Large Hard-On Provider"
Then the Destroyer will plug the Optimus into the Phantom, boot Duke Nukem Forever, and the universe will come to an end.
OK, I'm in the Harvest Valley estates.
BTW: If you guys have a problem with pulling fiber the last mile, and want to look at going wireless - I have a tower, we can bargain.
Since this is venturing OT for this thread, I'll just ask this: Is there anybody I can contact to get on the list for this? I'd like to think I'd be a good test candidate....
email me, if you would be so kind, at wowbagger at (the company about which we are talking). net
Right now, while the software specs are pretty open, the hardware specs are under NDA - and as I said, basically you cannot buy CBE chips from IBM unless you are Sony or Mercury: IBM says the chip requires too much specialized support hardware to work.
SO MAKE A DAMN MODULE OUT OF IT!
Yes, IBM and Toshiba have really blown it on that regard.
Pretty good. I was about to leave SKTC to Pixius because of cost/speed, but then the line went to 1.5M and I lost my motivation to do so. You are correct - just because the RBOCs are bastards doesn't mean that all telcos are being irresponsible with the USF.
And if you noticed, I needed the CBEs in a MicroTCA form factor, not a PCI-E or blade form factor.
It would be really great that they are moving to a smaller process, (/me takes deep breath)
IF THEY WOULD SELL YOU THE DAMN THINGS!
Where I work, we approached them to try to buy Cell processors for our equipment: the SPUs would make dandy DSP replacements, and we really could use the closer coupling of the processors instead of having a bunch of DSPs and spending all our time schlepping data around.
IBM wouldn't sell us any modules, wouldn't let us design our own CPU board, nothing. They seem supremely uninterested in actually getting these out into the hands of anybody other than their own divisions and Sony.
HEY IBM! How about you guys release these in a MicroTCA formfactor, or as a module that can be integrated into a MicroTCA?
IIRC you work for SKTC, right?