SPU's do have local memory access. However, local memory access is not the same as unprotected memory access. All accesses to external memory (DMA) can be protected. DMA commands use the same type of translation and protection governed by the page and segment tables of the Power Architecture as the PPU (indeed there is MMU management for each Memory Flow Controller for each SPU). I suggest you read this paper to see the memory management on the SPU: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/librar y/pa-celldmas/
The SPU's can run in a completely safe and sand-boxed environment with actual SPU threads and processes. In fact, you can set a secure "vault" mode in which the SPU is completely disconnected from external access and it's possible to ensure that SPU's are not capable of touching anything other than what is in their local memory (and nothing external can touch the SPU's local store in this mode).
If during normal SPU something goes wrong (i.e. access to a protected area), it's possible to kill the curren SPU process and restart the SPU with a new process -- neither that specific SPU nore the Cell processor need to be hung up by some bad SPU code. In this respect, it's possible to build a secure OS that allows SPU access. If something bad happens on an SPU, you can kill the offending process -- just like if something goes bad on a single core on a Core2Duo process, the linux kernel can kill the process. The machine won't go "tits up" -- just your process will get killed. But this is true of any bad program on any "secure" OS.
I don't know what you're claiming as a "supervisor" bit for memory protection. Perhaps you're referring to read/modify/execute (RWX) page settings on the page-table (and cached in the TLB) with virtualized memory access. The SPU's do not have a TLB for local store (although it is mapped into the PPU address space and that TLB). However, they can set up "privileged" areas in local memory (and local register address space - i.e. DMA regs) that can be used to accomplish memory protection for local store and access to non-allowed areas can cause an exception which the OS can then deal with appropriately. Additionally, there is an Local Store Limit Register (LSLR) to mask the available region of local store. Now witin the normally accessible area of local store, the SPU can store instructions and execute them allowing for self-modifying code. Before DEP on windows (and/or if your CPU is more than a year or two old and doesn't support execution page protection), you could make self-modfying code run in any region of writeable memory -- one reason why windows buffer overflows are so easy to exploit.
As far as the "this is how we program SPU's", sure you can program stuff to only run only 6 fixed SPU tasks with no swapping and use 256K data blocks (minus code overhead) so you have DMA latencies. However, you implied by stating those as limitations that was the *ONLY* way to program them which is wrong. All the papers out there from IBM and Sony suggest PREFERRED METHODS which are different than your implied limitation. They advocate cooperatively running multiple small task (dozens or even hundreds) rather than dedicating cores to fixed tasks and to double-buffer data (or even code) to mask DMA latencies. Singular task SPU usage can lead to idle SPU's very easily. Additionally, the double-buffer method can hide DMA latencies which can double the speed of your code if you're roughly equal on memory (DMA) and SPU compute time. We prefer to program SPU's in the manner in which they will be utilized much more fully and run up to 2X faster. I think anyone rewriting code for the SPU (since you have to retarget for the SPU anyway, there's no reason to write your code in a manner that will deliberately underperform).
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about since you're wrong on every point you make. I'm a PS3 developer but all of the points I make below are well known, publicly released information.
Cell is very optimized toward one data type for calculation: 64bit floats
Wrong!!! Cell is optimized towards 4-float vectors of 32-bit floats. All the vector math operations on the SPU operate this way and it's capable of doing 8 32-bit operations per cycle (FMAC = 32-bit multiply + 32-bit add X 4 wide). On the other hand, 64-bit operations are scalar and non-pipelined. The take a minimum of 7 cycles for throughput and can have longer latency (13 clock cycles). The maximum 32-bit FP Single Precision (SP) rate is at least 28 times faster than the DP rate.
b) either:
- fit code and data segments within 256K for each SPU
- crunch long enough between streamed data blocks such that DMA latency doesn't kill performance
Wrong!!! Actually, a single code processing step and data should fit in considerably less than 256K. Preferably around 128K. Then you can double-buffer your DMA's for input and output. When you do this the DMA latency doesn't even matter unless your processing occurs faster than the DMA transfers since your DMA's are completely asynchonous to the SPU processing. This simple method of programming can hide nearly all DMA latency -- especially for code that repetitively iterates on multiple data blocks.
c) have the entire calculation broken down into no more than six parts for streaming (one per SPU)
Wrong!!! You can break the calculation into many more parts than six. As a matter of fact you could have 100 calculation parts on on chunk of data and simply swap in new code and work on old data. You can arbitrarily schedule more than a single task per SPU. Sony (and even IBM on non PS3 Cells) have libraries that allow you to share SPUs between many different tasks with only a very small minimal overhead incurred in switching between a task on the SPU.
Also, SPUs don't support a supervisor bit for memory protection
Wrong!!! The SPU's can only directly access their own local memory. All other accesses go through a protected external memory interface (the SPU DMA to main memory) and are controlled by memory protection. It is possibly to virtualize and lock-out SPU's from the rest of the system and run them in "safe mode". If the SPU's could run rampantly and access the entire memory there wouldn't be much point to Sony running a hypervisor to keep you out of their system space on the PS3 linux project and still give you access to the SPU. Also, it wouldn't make much sense not to have memory protection from IBM's point of view to use Cell's as CPUs for clustered supercomputers.
bad things happen when threaded code running on SPU goes tits up
Wrong!!! There is no reason on the CELL hardware why it shouldn't be possible to kill SPU threads / processes and the SPU rescheduled by the OS if necessary. This way a single task can no more take down an SPU than the PPSU. It is possible to even swap out an entire SPU programs pre-emptively on the fly and restore their state. This incurs a much higher swap cost (full SPU threading) than a more simple task manager because you have to save and restore the entire context of the SPU (including 128 16-byte registers and 256K memory region) but your implied limitation of the SPU's is definitely incorrect here.
If you want to calculate 128bit floats, ints, or have lots of branch logic... buy a quad core2duo
So quad-core2duo can do 128-bit floats ? If you're thinking SSE (4 X 32-bit floats) then the SPU's do the same thing. SPU's can run integer code albeit more slowly since most of the integer operations are scalar but still running integer code in parallel on an SPU can sometimes be faster than a Core2Duo - If you align scalar-processed integers to 16-bits for preferred slot l
As a marketable skill, assembly won't get you anywhere.
Unless you want to be a video game programmer and get to touch low level hardware on PS3, 360, PS2, XBOX, Gamecube, Wii, etc. That's my job at Midway Games and it requires lots of asm knowledge. From being able to debug "beta" compilers that are in constant flux to disassembling chain-mode DMA packets, you have to get to know the machine. Maybe not all the gameplay programmers know assembler but all the senior systems programmers certainly do.
To be fair, in order to compete on a feature-by-feature basis with the $599 PS3 you actually need to buy the $479 360 Elite + $199 HD-DVD + $99 360-WIFI-802.11G Adapter for a total of $777. Makes the PS3 almost look like a bargain once you add the HD disc (BluRay or HD-DVD) playback and wifi that come standard with the Sony console.
Where on that map do I find papers published by the Creationism/Intelligent Design
The entire map itself implies Creationism and Intelligent Design. Did anyone notice how much the graph with the flowing lines for labels looks suprisingly like the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Even as we search to explain the world with science his very form appears every from within the heart of cold scientific diagrams to a nice Italian dinner.
Actually, they tested the DCLD (Dick Cheney Lie Detector) and deemed it a failure when it was found the detector always gave a positive response for lie detection for every statement Cheney has ever made.
FWIW, I replaced about 60 bulbs in my house (many of the rooms have 4 or 5 bulb fixtures) about 4 years ago with CFs from IKEA. They're brighter than the old incandescents, the turn on immediately, they don't buzz and I have yet to have a single CF burn out.
I got the Wii at normal price by being persistant for about 5 weeks but I still can't buy an extra wii-mote and nunchuck. I wanted to get Wii-Play but the Best Buy near my house (which is a major store) only got 6 in! Same story at Target and other stores -- Wii-Play had *VERY* limited ship-in. It sucks that the only way I can buy an extra controller is to pay markup prices on CL or eBay. And there are a bunch of jerks selling overpriced Wii-Play boxes without the remote on eBay as well:-(
Not to mention that there might be intelligent life in OTHER GALAXIES and GALAXIES are *A LOT* further apart than mere STARS within the Milky Way.
There could also be intelligent life currently colonizing this galaxy and when they get to earth... well, you know what happened to the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, and the North American Indian tribes....
If I'm an employer, I'm going to have a bit of sympathy for someone who has cancer. I don't know if I can really say the same about someone who'd drunk all the time or so high on pot or wasting away from crack cocaine usage. There is very little personal choice when it comes to cancer but ultimately their is some choice in addictive behavior (you have to take the substance somehow to become addicted to it).
Even if he never visited adult sites at work, if it affected his ability to work, he should be terminated. If you have an alcoholic who is so affected by his drinking that he becomes unproductive, you should fire them. If they come in with a hangover every day and have zero productivity, that's wrong even if they've never had a drink at work.
The real problem isn't conservative Republicans (that are conservative politically in the fiscal management of their budgets). It's that the words "conservative" and "liberal" have been hijacked to represent fundamentalist versus everything else so that in order to be an electable member the Republican party you practically have to be Anti-Gay, pro-Intelligent Design, and against reproductive choice regardless of your views on actual gov't policies.
You're wrong on one thing. Right now the word "conservative" is used much more in the sense to describe "Fundamentalism" (christianity) more than political view.
For example, our current president in considered by most people to be quite "conservative" while has done very little that could be considered politically conservative -- he's totally gone anti-conservative on smaller gov't, less intrusion on citizens, balanced budget & responsible fiscal policy, adherance to the constitution, states rights, separation of powers, property rights, etc. Possibly the single politically conservative act he's done in his entire tenure is to significantly lower taxes for the big business and "ultra"-rich ala trickle-down economics.
But if it requires violence to use the word. I guess we should save the word "ultra" for the "conservatives" (again religious rather than political) that bash gays or blow-up family planning centers then.
The Jewish myth of creation -- where God creates the universe in six days including all life on earth and rests on the seventh -- is presented in the Old Testament. Fundamentalists who hold strictly to this viewpoint ignore many other parts of the same tome... for example, the proscription against eating pork or mixing dairy and meat.
Everytime they're eating a bacon cheeseburger from McDonald's they're defying God in a manner at least as heinous as giving a little thought to Evolution.
There's a word for people "hanging out with some dealers, but they never saw me using, buying, or selling any drugs". They're called look-outs -- their job is to watch for law enforcement and to notify the dealer so he can get away clean. Of course they get arrested as well if they're caught. Hanging out with any aquaintance while you are knowledgeable of them committing a crime (espcially on a regular basis) and you not stopping or reporting that crime may make you an accessory to the crime. You can't simply "hang out" with a murderer while he's killing people even if you don't get any of the blood on yourself.
Now legitimately using a bittorent client isn't the same at all as hanging out with drug dealers. It's more like stopping in a book store to pick up a book on chemistry and being arrested because the book store happens to be selling child pornography.
The OLPC poject gave up on existing software years ago. All OLPC applications must be written (or ported) specifically for OLPC.
128 MB RAM and 512 MB total storage in Flash RAM.
Of course all the apps are specifically rewritten for OLPC. Security aside, most applications written for today's computers with 100+GB HD's won't load on a computer with only 128 MB of RAM without VM. Heck, with swap-files/VM disabled, you can't boot into a typical install of XP if you only have 128MB RAM much less run any applications.
Sigh, then again, I remember when my Amiga had a useful pre-emptive multitasking OS running multiple GUI programs in only 512K (that's K not M) and my storage being 880K floppies. Of course, since there was no security, one program could crash the machine so I do envy Bitfrost. I think these OLPC's will have plenty of power and memory for poor kids as long as they can avoid bloatware and cruft.
This is stupid, but until the iPod can play Ogg Vorbis, it'll never be truly mainstream. It'll stay a geek format forever
The parent is insightful, not trolling. When one digital music player has 70-80% of the market, your digital music format has no chance in the market unless it plays on that device (AAC and MP3). Even if everything other than iPod started playing Ogg Vorbis, it still would have trouble mattering since we already have MP3 for universal playback. Until there's iPod support or until there's a serious iPod challenger that plays Ogg Vorbis, it will never be more popular than WMA which has the same issues.
Oh, but you say, taking things as fact without questioning why is a folly committed only by stupid people, thus making them ignorant. The two are really the same. I would then ask you why light is both a particle and a wave and why electrons jump to a different energy level when hit by the right frequencey of light. There's probably less than 1,000 people on the planet who can give a good answer to these questions, and unless you're one of them, you've committed the same folly as your average suburban mom - you still don't truly know why a microwave works
Microwave ovens have very little to do with electrons jumping through quantum-energy states due to absorption/emissions of photons of specific freqencys. You're confusing them with lasers and LEDs here. Microwave ovens actually work because their longer wavelengths cause electromagnetic field variations that affect polarized molecules such as water, fats, and sugars. The fields reverse at about 2.4 billion times per second and the resulting vibrations induced in the polarized molecules generates heat. The energy that results is "kinetic" with respect to the entire molecule rather than quantum changes at the single electron level. It's akin to pretending the water molecules are your hands and the microwaves make you rub your hands together very quickly.
I don't understand why a shark would surface if it was sick, that would just make it more vulnerable to unforeseen predators.
One of the first symptoms of many types of sickness in most species of fish is difficulty controlling their buoyancy. If you have a fish tank and your fish is sitting at the top or bottom of the tank and moving slowly, that's a good sign it's a sick fishy.
I have bad eyesight (-13 diopters) and it's hard for me to read long documents on the computer but I have no trouble printing them out and reading them. Does this $15.99 PDF have DRM protection against printing? I've run into that once or twice and it's a pain for me:(
I clicked on the link in your sig and I have some constructive criticism to offer your company.
> Photoshop has 20+ layer modes. We offer 70+ at 10% the cost. [blackbeltsystems.com]
Wow is that web-page UGLY. You'd think that a company offering image manipulation software would know enough about imaging to not have such an ugly webpage. Especially annoying shit like
* blue text on two slightly different blue backgrounds for the navigation links
* metalled embossed hard to read fonts as headers
* "link-heavy" text with more links than text (put it into a list of feature links)
* multi-column text that goes off-page requiring "back-scrolling" to read
* juvenile snipes at vague competitors rather than professional and objective feature comparisons
* overuse of exclamation points! Especially in testimonials! No Really!
* prominent google ads for a site trying to sell commercial software
One presumes there are sonic booms associated with this
The sonic shockwave for a 5 inch projectile is much less than that of a jet fighter. Regular bullets produce a sonic boom (the cracking sound that comes from a rifle). The loudness of a sonic boom is propotional to the volume of air that needs to be displaced at supersonic speed which is relative to the speed and the forward surface area of the object. A 5 inch projectile would be closer in scale to the sound produced by a bullet than that of a jet plane which has several thousand times larger front surface area. Also a supersonic jet produces multiple sonic booms as different forward surfaces generate independant mach cones (from nose, tail, wing tips, etc.).
They're not tools they're "great tools", they don't provide a product they "enable consumers", their product doesn't just do a job it is "absolutely successful" argghhhhhhh............. One of my aims in life is never to buy anything from a company that uses this sort of PR speak.
I take it you don't buy anything commercially sold in the US then ???
But the only real concern in making a killer NIC is keeping all the processing off of the CPU and bus.
Supposedly, the card is a complete Linux computer and they have an OS programmable API that will let you program and offload your own networking apps to the card.
Slashdot Mirror
SPU's do have local memory access. However, local memory access is not the same as unprotected memory access. All accesses to external memory (DMA) can be protected. DMA commands use the same type of translation and protection governed by the page and segment tables of the Power Architecture as the PPU (indeed there is MMU management for each Memory Flow Controller for each SPU). I suggest you read this paper to see the memory management on the SPU: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/librar y/pa-celldmas/
The SPU's can run in a completely safe and sand-boxed environment with actual SPU threads and processes. In fact, you can set a secure "vault" mode in which the SPU is completely disconnected from external access and it's possible to ensure that SPU's are not capable of touching anything other than what is in their local memory (and nothing external can touch the SPU's local store in this mode).
If during normal SPU something goes wrong (i.e. access to a protected area), it's possible to kill the curren SPU process and restart the SPU with a new process -- neither that specific SPU nore the Cell processor need to be hung up by some bad SPU code. In this respect, it's possible to build a secure OS that allows SPU access. If something bad happens on an SPU, you can kill the offending process -- just like if something goes bad on a single core on a Core2Duo process, the linux kernel can kill the process. The machine won't go "tits up" -- just your process will get killed. But this is true of any bad program on any "secure" OS.
I don't know what you're claiming as a "supervisor" bit for memory protection. Perhaps you're referring to read/modify/execute (RWX) page settings on the page-table (and cached in the TLB) with virtualized memory access. The SPU's do not have a TLB for local store (although it is mapped into the PPU address space and that TLB). However, they can set up "privileged" areas in local memory (and local register address space - i.e. DMA regs) that can be used to accomplish memory protection for local store and access to non-allowed areas can cause an exception which the OS can then deal with appropriately. Additionally, there is an Local Store Limit Register (LSLR) to mask the available region of local store. Now witin the normally accessible area of local store, the SPU can store instructions and execute them allowing for self-modifying code. Before DEP on windows (and/or if your CPU is more than a year or two old and doesn't support execution page protection), you could make self-modfying code run in any region of writeable memory -- one reason why windows buffer overflows are so easy to exploit.
As far as the "this is how we program SPU's", sure you can program stuff to only run only 6 fixed SPU tasks with no swapping and use 256K data blocks (minus code overhead) so you have DMA latencies. However, you implied by stating those as limitations that was the *ONLY* way to program them which is wrong. All the papers out there from IBM and Sony suggest PREFERRED METHODS which are different than your implied limitation. They advocate cooperatively running multiple small task (dozens or even hundreds) rather than dedicating cores to fixed tasks and to double-buffer data (or even code) to mask DMA latencies. Singular task SPU usage can lead to idle SPU's very easily. Additionally, the double-buffer method can hide DMA latencies which can double the speed of your code if you're roughly equal on memory (DMA) and SPU compute time. We prefer to program SPU's in the manner in which they will be utilized much more fully and run up to 2X faster. I think anyone rewriting code for the SPU (since you have to retarget for the SPU anyway, there's no reason to write your code in a manner that will deliberately underperform).
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about since you're wrong on every point you make. I'm a PS3 developer but all of the points I make below are well known, publicly released information.
Cell is very optimized toward one data type for calculation: 64bit floats
Wrong!!! Cell is optimized towards 4-float vectors of 32-bit floats. All the vector math operations on the SPU operate this way and it's capable of doing 8 32-bit operations per cycle (FMAC = 32-bit multiply + 32-bit add X 4 wide). On the other hand, 64-bit operations are scalar and non-pipelined. The take a minimum of 7 cycles for throughput and can have longer latency (13 clock cycles). The maximum 32-bit FP Single Precision (SP) rate is at least 28 times faster than the DP rate.
b) either:
- fit code and data segments within 256K for each SPU
- crunch long enough between streamed data blocks such that DMA latency doesn't kill performance
Wrong!!! Actually, a single code processing step and data should fit in considerably less than 256K. Preferably around 128K. Then you can double-buffer your DMA's for input and output. When you do this the DMA latency doesn't even matter unless your processing occurs faster than the DMA transfers since your DMA's are completely asynchonous to the SPU processing. This simple method of programming can hide nearly all DMA latency -- especially for code that repetitively iterates on multiple data blocks.
c) have the entire calculation broken down into no more than six parts for streaming (one per SPU)
Wrong!!! You can break the calculation into many more parts than six. As a matter of fact you could have 100 calculation parts on on chunk of data and simply swap in new code and work on old data. You can arbitrarily schedule more than a single task per SPU. Sony (and even IBM on non PS3 Cells) have libraries that allow you to share SPUs between many different tasks with only a very small minimal overhead incurred in switching between a task on the SPU.
Also, SPUs don't support a supervisor bit for memory protection
Wrong!!! The SPU's can only directly access their own local memory. All other accesses go through a protected external memory interface (the SPU DMA to main memory) and are controlled by memory protection. It is possibly to virtualize and lock-out SPU's from the rest of the system and run them in "safe mode". If the SPU's could run rampantly and access the entire memory there wouldn't be much point to Sony running a hypervisor to keep you out of their system space on the PS3 linux project and still give you access to the SPU. Also, it wouldn't make much sense not to have memory protection from IBM's point of view to use Cell's as CPUs for clustered supercomputers.
bad things happen when threaded code running on SPU goes tits up
Wrong!!! There is no reason on the CELL hardware why it shouldn't be possible to kill SPU threads / processes and the SPU rescheduled by the OS if necessary. This way a single task can no more take down an SPU than the PPSU. It is possible to even swap out an entire SPU programs pre-emptively on the fly and restore their state. This incurs a much higher swap cost (full SPU threading) than a more simple task manager because you have to save and restore the entire context of the SPU (including 128 16-byte registers and 256K memory region) but your implied limitation of the SPU's is definitely incorrect here.
If you want to calculate 128bit floats, ints, or have lots of branch logic... buy a quad core2duo
So quad-core2duo can do 128-bit floats ? If you're thinking SSE (4 X 32-bit floats) then the SPU's do the same thing. SPU's can run integer code albeit more slowly since most of the integer operations are scalar but still running integer code in parallel on an SPU can sometimes be faster than a Core2Duo - If you align scalar-processed integers to 16-bits for preferred slot l
As a marketable skill, assembly won't get you anywhere.
Unless you want to be a video game programmer and get to touch low level hardware on PS3, 360, PS2, XBOX, Gamecube, Wii, etc. That's my job at Midway Games and it requires lots of asm knowledge. From being able to debug "beta" compilers that are in constant flux to disassembling chain-mode DMA packets, you have to get to know the machine. Maybe not all the gameplay programmers know assembler but all the senior systems programmers certainly do.
To be fair, in order to compete on a feature-by-feature basis with the $599 PS3 you actually need to buy the $479 360 Elite + $199 HD-DVD + $99 360-WIFI-802.11G Adapter for a total of $777. Makes the PS3 almost look like a bargain once you add the HD disc (BluRay or HD-DVD) playback and wifi that come standard with the Sony console.
Where on that map do I find papers published by the Creationism/Intelligent Design
The entire map itself implies Creationism and Intelligent Design. Did anyone notice how much the graph with the flowing lines for labels looks suprisingly like the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Even as we search to explain the world with science his very form appears every from within the heart of cold scientific diagrams to a nice Italian dinner.
Actually, they tested the DCLD (Dick Cheney Lie Detector) and deemed it a failure when it was found the detector always gave a positive response for lie detection for every statement Cheney has ever made.
FWIW, I replaced about 60 bulbs in my house (many of the rooms have 4 or 5 bulb fixtures) about 4 years ago with CFs from IKEA. They're brighter than the old incandescents, the turn on immediately, they don't buzz and I have yet to have a single CF burn out.
I got the Wii at normal price by being persistant for about 5 weeks but I still can't buy an extra wii-mote and nunchuck. I wanted to get Wii-Play but the Best Buy near my house (which is a major store) only got 6 in! Same story at Target and other stores -- Wii-Play had *VERY* limited ship-in. It sucks that the only way I can buy an extra controller is to pay markup prices on CL or eBay. And there are a bunch of jerks selling overpriced Wii-Play boxes without the remote on eBay as well :-(
Not to mention that there might be intelligent life in OTHER GALAXIES and GALAXIES are *A LOT* further apart than mere STARS within the Milky Way.
There could also be intelligent life currently colonizing this galaxy and when they get to earth... well, you know what happened to the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, and the North American Indian tribes....
If I'm an employer, I'm going to have a bit of sympathy for someone who has cancer. I don't know if I can really say the same about someone who'd drunk all the time or so high on pot or wasting away from crack cocaine usage. There is very little personal choice when it comes to cancer but ultimately their is some choice in addictive behavior (you have to take the substance somehow to become addicted to it).
Even if he never visited adult sites at work, if it affected his ability to work, he should be terminated. If you have an alcoholic who is so affected by his drinking that he becomes unproductive, you should fire them. If they come in with a hangover every day and have zero productivity, that's wrong even if they've never had a drink at work.
The real problem isn't conservative Republicans (that are conservative politically in the fiscal management of their budgets). It's that the words "conservative" and "liberal" have been hijacked to represent fundamentalist versus everything else so that in order to be an electable member the Republican party you practically have to be Anti-Gay, pro-Intelligent Design, and against reproductive choice regardless of your views on actual gov't policies.
You're wrong on one thing. Right now the word "conservative" is used much more in the sense to describe "Fundamentalism" (christianity) more than political view.
For example, our current president in considered by most people to be quite "conservative" while has done very little that could be considered politically conservative -- he's totally gone anti-conservative on smaller gov't, less intrusion on citizens, balanced budget & responsible fiscal policy, adherance to the constitution, states rights, separation of powers, property rights, etc. Possibly the single politically conservative act he's done in his entire tenure is to significantly lower taxes for the big business and "ultra"-rich ala trickle-down economics.
But if it requires violence to use the word. I guess we should save the word "ultra" for the "conservatives" (again religious rather than political) that bash gays or blow-up family planning centers then.
The Jewish myth of creation -- where God creates the universe in six days including all life on earth and rests on the seventh -- is presented in the Old Testament. Fundamentalists who hold strictly to this viewpoint ignore many other parts of the same tome... for example, the proscription against eating pork or mixing dairy and meat.
Everytime they're eating a bacon cheeseburger from McDonald's they're defying God in a manner at least as heinous as giving a little thought to Evolution.
There's a word for people "hanging out with some dealers, but they never saw me using, buying, or selling any drugs". They're called look-outs -- their job is to watch for law enforcement and to notify the dealer so he can get away clean. Of course they get arrested as well if they're caught. Hanging out with any aquaintance while you are knowledgeable of them committing a crime (espcially on a regular basis) and you not stopping or reporting that crime may make you an accessory to the crime. You can't simply "hang out" with a murderer while he's killing people even if you don't get any of the blood on yourself.
Now legitimately using a bittorent client isn't the same at all as hanging out with drug dealers. It's more like stopping in a book store to pick up a book on chemistry and being arrested because the book store happens to be selling child pornography.
The OLPC poject gave up on existing software years ago. All OLPC applications must be written (or ported) specifically for OLPC.
128 MB RAM and 512 MB total storage in Flash RAM.
Of course all the apps are specifically rewritten for OLPC. Security aside, most applications written for today's computers with 100+GB HD's won't load on a computer with only 128 MB of RAM without VM. Heck, with swap-files/VM disabled, you can't boot into a typical install of XP if you only have 128MB RAM much less run any applications.
Sigh, then again, I remember when my Amiga had a useful pre-emptive multitasking OS running multiple GUI programs in only 512K (that's K not M) and my storage being 880K floppies. Of course, since there was no security, one program could crash the machine so I do envy Bitfrost. I think these OLPC's will have plenty of power and memory for poor kids as long as they can avoid bloatware and cruft.
This is stupid, but until the iPod can play Ogg Vorbis, it'll never be truly mainstream. It'll stay a geek format forever
The parent is insightful, not trolling. When one digital music player has 70-80% of the market, your digital music format has no chance in the market unless it plays on that device (AAC and MP3). Even if everything other than iPod started playing Ogg Vorbis, it still would have trouble mattering since we already have MP3 for universal playback. Until there's iPod support or until there's a serious iPod challenger that plays Ogg Vorbis, it will never be more popular than WMA which has the same issues.
Oh, but you say, taking things as fact without questioning why is a folly committed only by stupid people, thus making them ignorant. The two are really the same. I would then ask you why light is both a particle and a wave and why electrons jump to a different energy level when hit by the right frequencey of light. There's probably less than 1,000 people on the planet who can give a good answer to these questions, and unless you're one of them, you've committed the same folly as your average suburban mom - you still don't truly know why a microwave works
Microwave ovens have very little to do with electrons jumping through quantum-energy states due to absorption/emissions of photons of specific freqencys. You're confusing them with lasers and LEDs here. Microwave ovens actually work because their longer wavelengths cause electromagnetic field variations that affect polarized molecules such as water, fats, and sugars. The fields reverse at about 2.4 billion times per second and the resulting vibrations induced in the polarized molecules generates heat. The energy that results is "kinetic" with respect to the entire molecule rather than quantum changes at the single electron level. It's akin to pretending the water molecules are your hands and the microwaves make you rub your hands together very quickly.
I don't understand why a shark would surface if it was sick, that would just make it more vulnerable to unforeseen predators.
One of the first symptoms of many types of sickness in most species of fish is difficulty controlling their buoyancy. If you have a fish tank and your fish is sitting at the top or bottom of the tank and moving slowly, that's a good sign it's a sick fishy.
I have bad eyesight (-13 diopters) and it's hard for me to read long documents on the computer but I have no trouble printing them out and reading them. Does this $15.99 PDF have DRM protection against printing? I've run into that once or twice and it's a pain for me :(
I clicked on the link in your sig and I have some constructive criticism to offer your company.
> Photoshop has 20+ layer modes. We offer 70+ at 10% the cost. [blackbeltsystems.com]
Wow is that web-page UGLY. You'd think that a company offering image manipulation software would know enough about imaging to not have such an ugly webpage. Especially annoying shit like
* blue text on two slightly different blue backgrounds for the navigation links
* metalled embossed hard to read fonts as headers
* "link-heavy" text with more links than text (put it into a list of feature links)
* multi-column text that goes off-page requiring "back-scrolling" to read
* juvenile snipes at vague competitors rather than professional and objective feature comparisons
* overuse of exclamation points! Especially in testimonials! No Really!
* prominent google ads for a site trying to sell commercial software
For punishment, I suggest you make your web-page designer navigate this site for an hour or two: http://corson.tv/main/buttugly.htm
One presumes there are sonic booms associated with this
The sonic shockwave for a 5 inch projectile is much less than that of a jet fighter. Regular bullets produce a sonic boom (the cracking sound that comes from a rifle). The loudness of a sonic boom is propotional to the volume of air that needs to be displaced at supersonic speed which is relative to the speed and the forward surface area of the object. A 5 inch projectile would be closer in scale to the sound produced by a bullet than that of a jet plane which has several thousand times larger front surface area. Also a supersonic jet produces multiple sonic booms as different forward surfaces generate independant mach cones (from nose, tail, wing tips, etc.).
Blog Entry: I hope that a bunch of people on slashdot will give me money. The End.
They're not tools they're "great tools", they don't provide a product they "enable consumers", their product doesn't just do a job it is "absolutely successful" argghhhhhhh............. One of my aims in life is never to buy anything from a company that uses this sort of PR speak.
I take it you don't buy anything commercially sold in the US then ???
But the only real concern in making a killer NIC is keeping all the processing off of the CPU and bus.
Supposedly, the card is a complete Linux computer and they have an OS programmable API that will let you program and offload your own networking apps to the card.