So a supercomputer will be as complex as brain somewhere in the 2010 to 2020 time frame.
A single, general-purpose CPU processes data serially. The 100 million, or billions, of neurons, dendrites and other connections in the brain don't have this limitation. Even at "20 Hz", they operate in parallel. Further, that 20 Hz figure is derived from EEG readings, so it's a gross reading of the electrical field emitted by the entire brain. This antique perception of the thought organ is outdated and limiting.
Bio-neurologics operate at the speed of chemical activity, which is to say fast. Who's to say what constitutes a bit or byte in the brain, and what represents a word, picture or symbol? We don't know yet.
There is, however, a programming language for the human brain, and it's called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).
Many pediatricians have expressed the opinion that, for autism, any association between MMR vaccination and the parents' recognition of the child's behavioral problems in coincidental. Such an assumption is inappropriate in the absence of a through history and investigation. For example, the symptoms of classical, early onset autism are often noticed initially, in the first and second years of life the child does not develop in the way of normal siblings and peers.
Parental concerns about the child's development are often expressed in the second year, when these differences become evident. MMR vaccine is given routinely at this age, and coincidence is therefore inevitable. However, in children with autistic regression, the pattern is of loss of speech, language and social skills, accompanied by bizzare behaviors, _in a previously developmentally normal child_. This is consistent with an early onset disintegrative psychosis. Furthermore, loss of speech and language are accompanied by symptoms of excessive thirst, bowel disturbances, self-injury, and a self-limited diet associated with cravings for particular foods. Atopy and recurrent, refactory upper respiratory tract infections are prominent features. These symptoms do not feature in the exclusively behavioral descriptors of the diagnostic manual for autism - DSM-IV.
The issue of coincidence may be addressed, in part, by considering those children who have received more than one measles containing vaccine.
...
I do tend to agree with you on the adding new hardware bit. Anyone know any software that makes this trivial?
I've seen a couple postings here on/. about a couple hardware detection services under development. Redhat has a pretty simple detection service -it usually detects new stuff.
Your points are well understood about Windows failures wrt o/s crashes & no-boots, but y'know what? Because M$oft exposes the machine user/owner to less of the underlying messiness, and also because applications are far, far more likely to sport user interfaces with the same basic UI architecture, the hassle factor is drastically reduced for them.
In Linux, there's really little that can be done about getting software developers to develop under a common look/feel, configuration file format, installation system, or error handler -look at all the friggin' window managers! All the command-line utils and apps that have nothing in common with each other.
I mean, compare just adding a hard drive to your system. My little sister, who's a fabric designer, knows not one iota about computer internals, installed a 30gb hd into her computer the other day. If this were linux, she'd have to mess with/etc/fstab, create a filesystem, all which require knowledge of -to the layperson- cryptic parameters and options.
But because she was using an operating system that respects end-users, it: 1) recognized the new hardware, 2) prompted her for automatic installation of the hardware driver, 3) offered to format the hd when it detected it had no filesystems, 4) assigned a drive letter/icon/mount point so it would be ready to use.
There are many, many issues like this that need filling in. "RTFM" is not gonna get Linux boosted any higher on the charts.
OS X is a kinda-sorta good step in maybe the right direction. In my brief time with it, it seems like command-line utilities (top for instance) offer information but don't allow you to make changes (kill for instance). Instead, OS X seems to force the enduser to go thru the GUI to do things they'd ordinarily, in Unix, do from a terminal window.
If this were bi-directional, that'd be cool. If it were all GUI, no terminal utilities, I'm not sure how I'd feel about that, but OS X presents a huge lesson for Linus and other GNU designers -get it into the GUI, and make it intelligent. It's not that hard.
the biggest single barrier preventing the 95% of desktop users currently running Windows convert to Linux
That's the #2 barrier. #1 is the usability of Linux itself- despite bold claims of converting one's own grandmum and kinder's PC over to Linux, what non-computer expert can realistically expect to wrestle with Linux when it fails to boot, or they add new hardware, install a new application, or, heaven forbid, they want to upgrade to the latest kernel? It's not for mere mortals.
There will always be a market for the easy-to-use O/S like MacOS and Windoze. Talk of "taking over" the Windows marketplace with Linux is just that, talk, with no inducements for the user themself. Bill knows this, it's why M$oft is on the offensive only in the server realm, not the desktop.
Until the typical end-users' desktop usability needs are taken seriously, there will be no mass migration to Linux.
I dunno, but decoding an MP3 while playing Unreal isn't exactly a punishing task for two 1.2GHz CPUs, and it certainly isn't one that offers numbers you can use to compare to other mobos.
I keep an elderly PCI Pentium 100 box around as router and to play MP3s -top sez mpg123 usually has less than 10% of the CPU at all times.
In fact, there's nothing in either Slashdot's article or Ace's that really helps poor 3D artists. This is what's keeping Slashdot's editors so busy, eh?
You obviously haven't read the fine print yet, have you?
If you had, you'd realize that many of the shiny new powers granted to the Prez, AG, the USAGs, the FBI, and others, have no limits as to their scope. Like in programming, things with global scope tend to cause problems, sooner or later.
Easy examples in U.S. Federal law: RICO statutes, Co-Intelpro, automatic drug-related asset forfeiture laws.
RICO was a good thing that neither sunseted nor was limited in scope. It ended up being applied to cases it wasn't suited for, and it's a very difficult thing to defend against. Enables AGs to say "we believe you've done a bad thing, we don't have proof, but you're going down anyway." Justice, eh?
Much of Bush and Ashcroft's rhetoric presumes guilt before innocence. The new structure of Bush's military tribunals assume that this form of Justice is infallible: As a defendent, you've one turn at bat. If you lose, you have no appeal, even if you received the death sentance. Plus, evidence can be withheld from the defense, and the sessions can be closed, so there's no chance to analyze or debate a ruling. Also, the jury is an empanelment of military law officers -not a jury of peers, not a jury of equals.
It's actually pretty ironic when you consider that we're coming off an economic boom that was driven in large part by growth, use and interest in the internet, which is powered in large part by, what's the answer kiddies? Open source, GPL'd and free software.
The claim that GPL is bad for the economy rings false. It's bad for just Microsoft's economy.:)
And I'd have to say it was fuzzy logic business plans and poor investment choices that filled the internet up with lots of crappy, abstract business ventures that went nowhere and burned loads of cash. Again, not the fault of the GPL.
I, and apparently many others, would like you to elaborate on this. And I mean that sincerely. I am a Java programmer, and I am not familiar with either object pascal or C#. I'm not sure at all what you mean by "interoperation [sic] with properties via methods."
It's a kind of syntactic sugar, that lets you associate get and put methods with a property name. Let's say you have a "color" property (class field variable), you'll create getcolor and putcolor methods that, behind the scenes, through compiler magic, make it so that 'obj.color:= red;' makes a call like 'obj.putcolor(red);', and 'x:= obj.color;' generates code like: 'x:=obj.getcolor();'.
It's been a while since last I programmed in Delphi, so I'm not remembering the proper naming convention for the get/put methods, but the idea's correct.
Yes, but forking isn't an issue because Apache pre-forks a number of "worker processes". So it should be true that a threaded Apache would give little advantage on many operating systems.
But forked or pre-forked, each process, which will handle only one "hit" at a time, has the same memory burden as a full apache process (coz that's what it is.)
Now compare this to the threaded version, where threads are objects, miniscule next to an Apache process, and where many of the other objects used by a thread are reused, not regenerated.
My experience in running Apache servers is that memory is consumed before bandwidth or processor... with threads it'll be cpu first, coz you'll be able to handle much higher number of concurrent requests.
The earlier point about thread-based Apache being more vulnerable to a process dying than process-based *is* true, so maybe a mix of processes and threads will give some margin towards failsafety. Don't run all server threads under just one process, have multiple processes, if that's possible.
On some platforms threads won't beat fork for speed
You care to substantiate this claim? fork() generally dupes the current process in memory -an expensive operation. Threads make no such operation, instead relying upon a simple, lightweight Thread object to manage execution, and in the case of servers and servlets, utilizing already-instantiated server objects to execute.
try { If your application consists of 1 process and 1000 threads, a single thread can bring down the entire application
}
catch (IllegalFUDOperation excep) {
Only if you're not on top of your exception handling!
}
All that aside, claiming that the law has been written to "defend the profitability of corporations", or to "guarantee... business models" is, frankly, silly.
But not silly enough to keep it from being true!
Although in American government it's ensconced within the scope of a treaty, in practice, the rules of the World Trade Organization have been used to sue governments in instances where decisions, laws or policies caused said government to cease doing business with the affected corporation -under the guise of "free trade." Type "MTBE" and "WTO" into google and you'll get a taste of what that's about.
I realize that's not precisely what you meant your focus was copyright law, but as I said, in practice, it's being done.
Who are we to assume that the way in which others were living was not working for them? Is ours the only way that works? If everybody on the face of the planet lived and worked as we did, there'd be nobody to make our sneakers or hockey pucks, and we'd need at least six planet earths to supply the resources and labor (~4% of the worlds population, the US, uses at least 25% of the worlds resources, you do the math.)
You'll find that's not the case. The specs quote THD and dynamic range values (-86dB and 87dB respectively) that are on par with cheap PC soundcards, significantly worse than decent home and prosumer audio gear.
Combine that with artifacts introduced and frequences subtraced by lossy MP3 compression, you've a recipe for poor quality sound (caveat: I've not listened to one yet.)
For a kilobuck, you can have a nice quality CD juke that'll give you much better sound quality.
And, it is a PC. Read the specs. I'd pry one open before buying to see if the audio output section/soundcard is built into the system board. In PCs where that's the case, I've found there to be *loads* of mobo-generated noise.
but the distance wasn't so far, only 10km. He used telescopes to find a neighbor who was close enough to telco for DSL (Cringely wasn't), then hooked the neighbor up for free and mounted 21dB-gain directional Yagi antennas.
Two examples of fighting the possibility of a prosecution were the legal fight mounted against COPA and CDA. IANAL but I believe the statutes in these acts were never enforced in their original form by the executive branch: they were challenged by plaintiffs who foresaw economic hardship (porn sites) and/or constitutional issues (ACLU), were successfully argued before and struck down by judges.
I really hope ACLU steps up to the plate on the final form of ATA/PATRIOT/USA, when it passes, as it most likely will.
"Those who are willing to forfeit liberty for security will have neither." -- Ben Franklin
If somone did send us a briefcase nuke, it is doubtful that we would be able to retaliate. First of all, all physical evidence would be obliterated
Not so. Like their chemical counterparts, detonated nukes leave behind lots of physical evidence: isotopes. NEST and other gov't agencies have tech and databases for determining where the bomb originated; ratios of nuke material and byproduct isotopes provide a relatively unique fingerprint. We can tell where a bomb's core material came from, post-detonation.
Stolen nuke material would pose a slightly different case, but the country that originally refined the plutonium/uranium will have to be really clear really fast about how their materials got into the hands of a "terrorist."
The camera lens fungus eats the coating on the lens. I've seen it before in Brasil, in the tropical zone. Any moisture accumulated inside the lens barrel has to be evaporated or the fungus will appear.
A good way to deal with this is put a damp lens in the sun for 1-10 minutes, until it heats up enough for the water to evaporate. But don't leave it in the sun for longer, as the delicate mechanisms, oils, and plastics can be very heat sensitive.
Also, a water-tight equipment bag (sold at camping equipment stores) combined with silica gel packs (available at camera stores like bhphoto.com) can create a humidity-free storage environment (but the gel packs die quickly! get the kind that turn red, and buy quantities. Dry the bag and equipment out in the sun before putting them all in together.)
CCTV stands for "Closed-Circuit TV", not "closed caption." It means the signal is generally carried by wire to a monitor or video switcher (although sometimes sent via short-range broadcast), where it is viewed by a Watcher (rent-a-cop etc.)
Now all you need is a portable TFT display, maybe one of those cheaper Samsung flat panels, just saw off the pedestal. Don't know if it needs a special video card tho.
Slashdot Mirror
So a supercomputer will be as complex as brain somewhere in the 2010 to 2020 time frame.
A single, general-purpose CPU processes data serially. The 100 million, or billions, of neurons, dendrites and other connections in the brain don't have this limitation. Even at "20 Hz", they operate in parallel. Further, that 20 Hz figure is derived from EEG readings, so it's a gross reading of the electrical field emitted by the entire brain. This antique perception of the thought organ is outdated and limiting.
Bio-neurologics operate at the speed of chemical activity, which is to say fast. Who's to say what constitutes a bit or byte in the brain, and what represents a word, picture or symbol? We don't know yet. There is, however, a programming language for the human brain, and it's called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).
The issue of coincidence
Many pediatricians have expressed the opinion that, for autism, any association between MMR vaccination and the parents' recognition of the child's behavioral problems in coincidental. Such an assumption is inappropriate in the absence of a through history and investigation. For example, the symptoms of classical, early onset autism are often noticed initially, in the first and second years of life the child does not develop in the way of normal siblings and peers.
Parental concerns about the child's development are often expressed in the second year, when these differences become evident. MMR vaccine is given routinely at this age, and coincidence is therefore inevitable. However, in children with autistic regression, the pattern is of loss of speech, language and social skills, accompanied by bizzare behaviors, _in a previously developmentally normal child_. This is consistent with an early onset disintegrative psychosis. Furthermore, loss of speech and language are accompanied by symptoms of excessive thirst, bowel disturbances, self-injury, and a self-limited diet associated with cravings for particular foods. Atopy and recurrent, refactory upper respiratory tract infections are prominent features. These symptoms do not feature in the exclusively behavioral descriptors of the diagnostic manual for autism - DSM-IV.
The issue of coincidence may be addressed, in part, by considering those children who have received more than one measles containing vaccine.
...
I do tend to agree with you on the adding new hardware bit. Anyone know any software that makes this trivial?
/. about a couple hardware detection services under development. Redhat has a pretty simple detection service -it usually detects new stuff.
/etc/fstab, create a filesystem, all which require knowledge of -to the layperson- cryptic parameters and options.
I've seen a couple postings here on
Your points are well understood about Windows failures wrt o/s crashes & no-boots, but y'know what? Because M$oft exposes the machine user/owner to less of the underlying messiness, and also because applications are far, far more likely to sport user interfaces with the same basic UI architecture, the hassle factor is drastically reduced for them.
In Linux, there's really little that can be done about getting software developers to develop under a common look/feel, configuration file format, installation system, or error handler -look at all the friggin' window managers! All the command-line utils and apps that have nothing in common with each other.
I mean, compare just adding a hard drive to your system. My little sister, who's a fabric designer, knows not one iota about computer internals, installed a 30gb hd into her computer the other day. If this were linux, she'd have to mess with
But because she was using an operating system that respects end-users, it: 1) recognized the new hardware, 2) prompted her for automatic installation of the hardware driver, 3) offered to format the hd when it detected it had no filesystems, 4) assigned a drive letter/icon/mount point so it would be ready to use.
There are many, many issues like this that need filling in. "RTFM" is not gonna get Linux boosted any higher on the charts.
OS X is a kinda-sorta good step in maybe the right direction. In my brief time with it, it seems like command-line utilities (top for instance) offer information but don't allow you to make changes (kill for instance). Instead, OS X seems to force the enduser to go thru the GUI to do things they'd ordinarily, in Unix, do from a terminal window.
If this were bi-directional, that'd be cool. If it were all GUI, no terminal utilities, I'm not sure how I'd feel about that, but OS X presents a huge lesson for Linus and other GNU designers -get it into the GUI, and make it intelligent. It's not that hard.
the biggest single barrier preventing the 95% of desktop users currently running Windows convert to Linux
That's the #2 barrier. #1 is the usability of Linux itself - despite bold claims of converting one's own grandmum and kinder's PC over to Linux, what non-computer expert can realistically expect to wrestle with Linux when it fails to boot, or they add new hardware, install a new application, or, heaven forbid, they want to upgrade to the latest kernel? It's not for mere mortals.
There will always be a market for the easy-to-use O/S like MacOS and Windoze. Talk of "taking over" the Windows marketplace with Linux is just that, talk, with no inducements for the user themself. Bill knows this, it's why M$oft is on the offensive only in the server realm, not the desktop.
Until the typical end-users' desktop usability needs are taken seriously, there will be no mass migration to Linux.
I dunno, but decoding an MP3 while playing Unreal isn't exactly a punishing task for two 1.2GHz CPUs, and it certainly isn't one that offers numbers you can use to compare to other mobos.
I keep an elderly PCI Pentium 100 box around as router and to play MP3s -top sez mpg123 usually has less than 10% of the CPU at all times.
In fact, there's nothing in either Slashdot's article or Ace's that really helps poor 3D artists. This is what's keeping Slashdot's editors so busy, eh?
What's up with that?
You obviously haven't read the fine print yet, have you?
If you had, you'd realize that many of the shiny new powers granted to the Prez, AG, the USAGs, the FBI, and others, have no limits as to their scope. Like in programming, things with global scope tend to cause problems, sooner or later.
Easy examples in U.S. Federal law: RICO statutes, Co-Intelpro, automatic drug-related asset forfeiture laws.
RICO was a good thing that neither sunseted nor was limited in scope. It ended up being applied to cases it wasn't suited for, and it's a very difficult thing to defend against. Enables AGs to say "we believe you've done a bad thing, we don't have proof, but you're going down anyway." Justice, eh?
Much of Bush and Ashcroft's rhetoric presumes guilt before innocence. The new structure of Bush's military tribunals assume that this form of Justice is infallible: As a defendent, you've one turn at bat. If you lose, you have no appeal, even if you received the death sentance. Plus, evidence can be withheld from the defense, and the sessions can be closed, so there's no chance to analyze or debate a ruling. Also, the jury is an empanelment of military law officers -not a jury of peers, not a jury of equals.
It's actually pretty ironic when you consider that we're coming off an economic boom that was driven in large part by growth, use and interest in the internet, which is powered in large part by, what's the answer kiddies? Open source, GPL'd and free software.
:)
The claim that GPL is bad for the economy rings false. It's bad for just Microsoft's economy.
And I'd have to say it was fuzzy logic business plans and poor investment choices that filled the internet up with lots of crappy, abstract business ventures that went nowhere and burned loads of cash. Again, not the fault of the GPL.
Just GPL Windows, Bill!
I, and apparently many others, would like you to elaborate on this. And I mean that sincerely. I am a Java programmer, and I am not familiar with either object pascal or C#. I'm not sure at all what you mean by "interoperation [sic] with properties via methods."
:= red;' makes a call like 'obj.putcolor(red);', and 'x := obj.color;' generates code like: 'x:=obj.getcolor();'.
It's a kind of syntactic sugar, that lets you associate get and put methods with a property name. Let's say you have a "color" property (class field variable), you'll create getcolor and putcolor methods that, behind the scenes, through compiler magic, make it so that 'obj.color
It's been a while since last I programmed in Delphi, so I'm not remembering the proper naming convention for the get/put methods, but the idea's correct.
Yes, but forking isn't an issue because Apache pre-forks a number of "worker processes". So it should be true that a threaded Apache would give little advantage on many operating systems.
But forked or pre-forked, each process, which will handle only one "hit" at a time, has the same memory burden as a full apache process (coz that's what it is.)
Now compare this to the threaded version, where threads are objects, miniscule next to an Apache process, and where many of the other objects used by a thread are reused, not regenerated.
My experience in running Apache servers is that memory is consumed before bandwidth or processor... with threads it'll be cpu first, coz you'll be able to handle much higher number of concurrent requests.
The earlier point about thread-based Apache being more vulnerable to a process dying than process-based *is* true, so maybe a mix of processes and threads will give some margin towards failsafety. Don't run all server threads under just one process, have multiple processes, if that's possible.
On some platforms threads won't beat fork for speed
You care to substantiate this claim? fork() generally dupes the current process in memory -an expensive operation. Threads make no such operation, instead relying upon a simple, lightweight Thread object to manage execution, and in the case of servers and servlets, utilizing already-instantiated server objects to execute.
try {
If your application consists of 1 process and 1000 threads, a single thread can bring down the entire application
}
catch (IllegalFUDOperation excep) {
Only if you're not on top of your exception handling!
}
All that aside, claiming that the law has been written to "defend the profitability of corporations", or to "guarantee ... business models" is, frankly, silly.
But not silly enough to keep it from being true!
Although in American government it's ensconced within the scope of a treaty, in practice, the rules of the World Trade Organization have been used to sue governments in instances where decisions, laws or policies caused said government to cease doing business with the affected corporation -under the guise of "free trade." Type "MTBE" and "WTO" into google and you'll get a taste of what that's about.
I realize that's not precisely what you meant your focus was copyright law, but as I said, in practice, it's being done.
here.
Who are we to assume that the way in which others were living was not working for them? Is ours the only way that works? If everybody on the face of the planet lived and worked as we did, there'd be nobody to make our sneakers or hockey pucks, and we'd need at least six planet earths to supply the resources and labor (~4% of the worlds population, the US, uses at least 25% of the worlds resources, you do the math.)
Combine that with artifacts introduced and frequences subtraced by lossy MP3 compression, you've a recipe for poor quality sound (caveat: I've not listened to one yet.)
For a kilobuck, you can have a nice quality CD juke that'll give you much better sound quality.
And, it is a PC. Read the specs. I'd pry one open before buying to see if the audio output section/soundcard is built into the system board. In PCs where that's the case, I've found there to be *loads* of mobo-generated noise.
Read his column from the week after, he talks about antennae and longer distances:
1 2. html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200107
but the distance wasn't so far, only 10km. He used telescopes to find a neighbor who was close enough to telco for DSL (Cringely wasn't), then hooked the neighbor up for free and mounted 21dB-gain directional Yagi antennas.
The story's an interesting read.
Two examples of fighting the possibility of a prosecution were the legal fight mounted against COPA and CDA. IANAL but I believe the statutes in these acts were never enforced in their original form by the executive branch: they were challenged by plaintiffs who foresaw economic hardship (porn sites) and/or constitutional issues (ACLU), were successfully argued before and struck down by judges.
I really hope ACLU steps up to the plate on the final form of ATA/PATRIOT/USA, when it passes, as it most likely will.
"Those who are willing to forfeit liberty for security will have neither." -- Ben Franklin
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Stolen nuke material would pose a slightly different case, but the country that originally refined the plutonium/uranium will have to be really clear really fast about how their materials got into the hands of a "terrorist."
The camera lens fungus eats the coating on the lens. I've seen it before in Brasil, in the tropical zone. Any moisture accumulated inside the lens barrel has to be evaporated or the fungus will appear. A good way to deal with this is put a damp lens in the sun for 1-10 minutes, until it heats up enough for the water to evaporate. But don't leave it in the sun for longer, as the delicate mechanisms, oils, and plastics can be very heat sensitive. Also, a water-tight equipment bag (sold at camping equipment stores) combined with silica gel packs (available at camera stores like bhphoto.com) can create a humidity-free storage environment (but the gel packs die quickly! get the kind that turn red, and buy quantities. Dry the bag and equipment out in the sun before putting them all in together.)
just do it.
Are rated by number, that being the amount of time it takes to break it or cut through it.
CCTV stands for "Closed-Circuit TV", not "closed caption." It means the signal is generally carried by wire to a monitor or video switcher (although sometimes sent via short-range broadcast), where it is viewed by a Watcher (rent-a-cop etc.)
http://www.compaq.com/products/handhelds/images/L2 27262-B21.jpg
Now all you need is a portable TFT display, maybe one of those cheaper Samsung flat panels, just saw off the pedestal. Don't know if it needs a special video card tho.