It's certainly true that the "latest and greatest" often isn't really any better and even when it is may not be worth the transition costs. I know someone who had a thorough understanding of WordPerfect for DOS- every key combination, how to wizard things with Reveal Codes, some understanding of macros, etc- but have never gotten as comfortable with anything since then. Is he more productive because his department has spent money on every word processor upgrade since Word 97? Heck no.
If they would just add touch/stylus input and a swivel hinge, I'd be really eager to buy one. Ever since the Sharp Zaurus clamshells with the swivel screens, I've thought that the convertible subnotebook was an idea which should catch on- but this kind of machine has been too expensive or too underpowered or too big or had too short of battery life to really compete well with both PDAs and larger laptops. With the newest generation of low-power processors and the lower prices for ultraportables which machines like the Eee are occasioning, I think the idea's time has come.
1024x768 is going to be a little more difficult to fit on something this size (and keep it readable and inexpensive). However, there's enough real estate to the sides of the screen to allow for 1024x600. For most people, that'll fit the bill (the main problem with 800x600 is that websites have been assuming that everybody has XGA page width and horizontal scrolling is a bear).
I've been trying different Linux releases since 6 or 7
Presumably you mean different Fedora releases since Fedora 6 or 7?
You'll note that their target machine for X11 2d desktop performance is a 1.7GHz Pentium M with a Radeon 7500, which they say is "not fast and therefore a good target for tuning." I miss the days when you could expect- out of the box- to get good desktop performance on your 400MHz Pentium II and have a ~1.5GB install footprint (or less if you bothered deselecting stuff you didn't need on install). Now endless tweaking and tuning and putzing with stuff is required to get poor (rather than abysmal) performance on something 2-3 times that fast using 2-3 times the space. There's really been about as much proportional bloat in Linux distros since the RH 6.x days as there has been in corresponding Windows versions up to Vista.
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html>SciTE is a similar lightweight editor which has the features you've mentioned (though from what I hear there's ways to make gedit behave that way too) and has, among others, the added bonuses of being cross-platform and not depending on gnome libraries.
I see that everyone else responding to your post has taken a fully allegorical view of this part of Genesis. That's one interpretation that's open, and it's true that to understand the meaning of the Fall you have to think of it in terms of what our human nature is like and not only as an isolated historical incident. However, I'd like to point out that evolution does not preclude the existence of a literal individual Adam (and Eve), though obviously some elements of the story (like Eve being created from Adam's rib) have to be taken symbolically.
The first man and woman, in the biblical sense, need not have been the first biped humanoids or even the first Homo sapiens sapiens. The biblical story would seem to indicate that they were the first humans who could understand good and evil and be morally responsible for their actions, and it attempts to explain this to us. Our moral accountability, not our cranial sizes or our use of tools, are what distinguishes man from animal.
Evolution doesn't rule out taking Adam to be the literal father of all mankind, either. Our most recent common ancestor cannot have been more than 60,000 years ago based on Y-chromosonal studies, and is very likely to have been less than 8,000 years ago.
I think Google Maps/Google Earth don't have the most detailed satellite information for most of Madagascar. So the level of detail at which it's surprising to be able to see this tree could perhaps be one zoom level out from the level at which it's unsurprising to be able to see cars.
The obvious solution is to send expendable humans to Mars and other Solar System targets. That way you can save the horrendous recovery costs AND get the romantic manned spaceflight angle, get some science in before supplies run out, and then have a tragiheroic ending which will surely capture the imagination of the masses.
For the good of humanity!
Another reason for bad rap- abuse of the format
on
PDF Is Now ISO 32000
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Very true. Another reason PDF has a bad rap is because people use it for things which it's not at all intended for. For instance, at my university, it seems like word-processed documents given to students to print out etc. are generally.DOC (where PDF would be ideal) while scanned-in documents are always in huge, bloated, and slow PDFs (where DejaVu would be ideal and any decent image format would be better than PDF).
To be on par with GNOME history (ah, the heady days of 1.4->2.0) they'd have to give you the buggy and less functional http://www.gnome.org/projects/nautilus/>new filemanager as default and then kill the maintenance of the former filemanager so your option of using it soon disappears. After all, choices are confusing to users, so the correct thing to do is to make all the wrong choices for them so they don't have to make any wrong choices themselves.
Even one bit per sample is enough to range from too quiet to hear up to the threshold of pain. You just make everything either one or the other.
The question is at what point the range of available values is large enough that enough dynamic information is preserved to faithfully reproduce the different dynamic levels in the original. With good mastering and dithering 16bit can be enough that people can't tell the difference between it and significantly higher numbers of bits per sample. But a little bit extra might be worth it. 20 - 24 bits is plenty- sometimes people seem to think that's be 1.25 - 1.5 times as many possible levels but of course it's 16 - 256 times as many.
At 44.1kHz and 16 bits/sample CDs really can have, with good mastering, frequency reproduction and dynamic range that are at the limit of the human ear. However, I imagine that a "perfect" format with 48kHz, 20 bits/sample, better error resiliency (physical and/or error-correction), smaller discs, some consideration given to long-term archival, and a technical solution to the loudness wars would be relatively simple to come up with at this point. It'd give people doing audio production and mastering some elbow room to work with and be future-proof as a standard for audio distribution until the last trumpet sounds or until humans evolve hearing that's significantly better, whichever comes first.
Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen, because
CDs are "good enough" and so heavily entrenched
"golden ear" audiophiles who by their spending have heretofore had a lot to do with driving the "better than cd" formats will insist that no matter what that dude "Nyquist" says if you just go whole hog with your equipment ($6000 cables included) you really can hear the difference that 384 kHz sampling makes, and that 64 bits per sample is soo much better
the industry has decided that letting engineering and quality considerations determine the format rather than DRM and marketing was a mistake
distribution and playback as distinct albums is giving way to lossy singles and hard drive players
The "scientific issue" has a hidden moral angle- a common argument by proponents of embryonic stem cell research is that it's immoral to block such research if such research would result in medical procedures which would alleviate suffering. If the research can be done - and any benefits therefrom gained - using only adult stem cells, then that argument is defused and we don't have to try to answer these questions:
1. Is the amount of suffering which could be alleviated a greater evil than the treatment of embryonic humans as things to be used and destroyed? 2. If so, is it morally right (or morally permissible) to actually commit the lesser evil to prevent the greater?
The article says that "trusted editor" status will be based on number and frequency of Wikipedia edits. I don't know about others, but I think that in many situations I would place considerably less trust in people who are constantly editing Wikipedia as opposed to occasional contributors- as a group they represent a very biased selection of the public at large*, and as individuals they often have agendas they're pushing which represent a major (if not the major) motivation for their continual editing.
*I was about to submit and realized this statement could be misread to mean that they're more biased people than average. That's not what is meant, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_bias.
D is the answer. It's meant to take the good ideas from C++, Java, and C# and make a modernized C-type language which is suitable for systems programming and (relatively) easy to implement.
There's a a GCC frontend) in the works as well. In general, it seems like once this language gets a bit more mindshare it will really take off.
(D is currently #1 on the Great Computer Language Shootout- and while it does help a little that it's the only one with all the tests implemented, its ranking is due to very impressive performance.)
When I see how inefficient the road construction around my town is I suspect the city council members must be getting kickbacks from the construction companies. The street I live on, which gets quite a bit of traffic, was resurfaced and repainted. It took the construction crew only a day or so, and the job was adequate. But (I think it's because the contract and kickback scheme must go by the hour) they came back and spent over a week standing around, putting another layer on top of what they had just done without removing anything, and then drilling through this second layer to reach the manholes they had idiotically cemented over. When they left and reopened my street, there was a dropoff of about an inch from the edge of the road surface to the gutters. I didn't complain to the city because I thought it might prompt another weeklong street closure.
Even beyond suspicions of graft, it seems a lot of cities are perfectly willing to tear up and redo a street because somebody suggested the street wasn't aesthetically pleasing enough but completely unwilling to spend another cent on education.
Would it not perhaps be better, given the goals for the card, to first see whether one of the existing 3d companies (Matrox, perhaps?) would be willing, for the right price, to open the IP for an outdated product?
Unless the GCC documentation is very wrong, the only tree-ssa optimizations in 4.0 which don't get turned on by default at -O3 are -ftree-loop-linear, -ftree-loop-im, -ftree-loop-ivcanon, -fivopts, and -ftree-vectorize. It's true that some of these may be good optimization wins (probably increasing compile time in the process, but that's what the higher optimization levels are all about), but there are plenty of tree-ssa optimization passes being used in these tests.
Auto-vectorization, by the way, does not fall into a "obvious optimization wins which perhaps should be enabled at -O3 by default" category. It can bring very big performance benefits in some situations, but it should be used with caution.
He didn't say if you *run* a lot of programs written in C++, he said if you *compile* a lot of C++. The performance of the generated code is roughly the same (slightly more often worse than better), but the compile time is considerably better. (The review linked to doesn't show this, but that's because it only includes one comparatively small c++ program; other people are showing huge improvements.)
To those saying "it's the legal troubles and fear of Sun": it's true enough that Sun's copyright assignment stance, licensing, etc are responsible for the NeoOffice fork and, to a large extent, the lack of corporate contributions, but the fact that contributors do retain (dual) copyright and that the GPL/LGPL licensing is irrevocable should mitigate that enough for community contributions.
To those saying "Break it up into components, like Moz": I don't think the problem is that OO.org comes as a whole as that the framework on which all of the apps are built is extremely complex.
To a smaller extent, Mozilla did have the same problem. Splitting the suite was a relatively minor (and thus far somewhat uneffective, as the problems with getting a shared GRE show) move for Moz compared with the momentous decision to ditch so much of the NS 4.x- pre5.x codebase in favor of Gecko, Seamonkey, etc. Even after that and years of improvement, Mozilla development is still known as rather difficult to get into well. Cleaning and simplifying the framework of StarOffice will be even harder.
The XGI release is 2d only (the kernel code is for fb support, not DRI), and from what I see on the Unichrome driver effort's mailing list archives the VIA source release is just making available to everyone what has been available through a "developer portal" for some time and does not make any more of the chipsets' features usable.
So the only possible real news here is a shift in the attitudes of these companies. We'll see how that works out in the future (whether enough information is released to allow open-source 3d drivers for XGI and full support for the VIA MPEG enc/dec acceleration).
Slashdot Mirror
It's certainly true that the "latest and greatest" often isn't really any better and even when it is may not be worth the transition costs. I know someone who had a thorough understanding of WordPerfect for DOS- every key combination, how to wizard things with Reveal Codes, some understanding of macros, etc- but have never gotten as comfortable with anything since then. Is he more productive because his department has spent money on every word processor upgrade since Word 97? Heck no.
If they would just add touch/stylus input and a swivel hinge, I'd be really eager to buy one. Ever since the Sharp Zaurus clamshells with the swivel screens, I've thought that the convertible subnotebook was an idea which should catch on- but this kind of machine has been too expensive or too underpowered or too big or had too short of battery life to really compete well with both PDAs and larger laptops. With the newest generation of low-power processors and the lower prices for ultraportables which machines like the Eee are occasioning, I think the idea's time has come.
1024x768 is going to be a little more difficult to fit on something this size (and keep it readable and inexpensive). However, there's enough real estate to the sides of the screen to allow for 1024x600. For most people, that'll fit the bill (the main problem with 800x600 is that websites have been assuming that everybody has XGA page width and horizontal scrolling is a bear).
You'll note that their target machine for X11 2d desktop performance is a 1.7GHz Pentium M with a Radeon 7500, which they say is "not fast and therefore a good target for tuning." I miss the days when you could expect- out of the box- to get good desktop performance on your 400MHz Pentium II and have a ~1.5GB install footprint (or less if you bothered deselecting stuff you didn't need on install). Now endless tweaking and tuning and putzing with stuff is required to get poor (rather than abysmal) performance on something 2-3 times that fast using 2-3 times the space. There's really been about as much proportional bloat in Linux distros since the RH 6.x days as there has been in corresponding Windows versions up to Vista.
SciTE
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html>SciTE is a similar lightweight editor which has the features you've mentioned (though from what I hear there's ways to make gedit behave that way too) and has, among others, the added bonuses of being cross-platform and not depending on gnome libraries.
I see that everyone else responding to your post has taken a fully allegorical view of this part of Genesis. That's one interpretation that's open, and it's true that to understand the meaning of the Fall you have to think of it in terms of what our human nature is like and not only as an isolated historical incident. However, I'd like to point out that evolution does not preclude the existence of a literal individual Adam (and Eve), though obviously some elements of the story (like Eve being created from Adam's rib) have to be taken symbolically.
The first man and woman, in the biblical sense, need not have been the first biped humanoids or even the first Homo sapiens sapiens. The biblical story would seem to indicate that they were the first humans who could understand good and evil and be morally responsible for their actions, and it attempts to explain this to us. Our moral accountability, not our cranial sizes or our use of tools, are what distinguishes man from animal.
Evolution doesn't rule out taking Adam to be the literal father of all mankind, either. Our most recent common ancestor cannot have been more than 60,000 years ago based on Y-chromosonal studies, and is very likely to have been less than 8,000 years ago.
I think Google Maps/Google Earth don't have the most detailed satellite information for most of Madagascar. So the level of detail at which it's surprising to be able to see this tree could perhaps be one zoom level out from the level at which it's unsurprising to be able to see cars.
That would be this.
The obvious solution is to send expendable humans to Mars and other Solar System targets. That way you can save the horrendous recovery costs AND get the romantic manned spaceflight angle, get some science in before supplies run out, and then have a tragiheroic ending which will surely capture the imagination of the masses.
For the good of humanity!
Very true. Another reason PDF has a bad rap is because people use it for things which it's not at all intended for. For instance, at my university, it seems like word-processed documents given to students to print out etc. are generally .DOC (where PDF would be ideal) while scanned-in documents are always in huge, bloated, and slow PDFs (where DejaVu would be ideal and any decent image format would be better than PDF).
To be on par with GNOME history (ah, the heady days of 1.4->2.0) they'd have to give you the buggy and less functional http://www.gnome.org/projects/nautilus/>new filemanager as default and then kill the maintenance of the former filemanager so your option of using it soon disappears. After all, choices are confusing to users, so the correct thing to do is to make all the wrong choices for them so they don't have to make any wrong choices themselves.
Even one bit per sample is enough to range from too quiet to hear up to the threshold of pain. You just make everything either one or the other.
The question is at what point the range of available values is large enough that enough dynamic information is preserved to faithfully reproduce the different dynamic levels in the original. With good mastering and dithering 16bit can be enough that people can't tell the difference between it and significantly higher numbers of bits per sample. But a little bit extra might be worth it. 20 - 24 bits is plenty- sometimes people seem to think that's be 1.25 - 1.5 times as many possible levels but of course it's 16 - 256 times as many.
Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen, because
- CDs are "good enough" and so heavily entrenched
- "golden ear" audiophiles who by their spending have heretofore had a lot to do with driving the "better than cd" formats will insist that no matter what that dude "Nyquist" says if you just go whole hog with your equipment ($6000 cables included) you really can hear the difference that 384 kHz sampling makes, and that 64 bits per sample is soo much better
- the industry has decided that letting engineering and quality considerations determine the format rather than DRM and marketing was a mistake
- distribution and playback as distinct albums is giving way to lossy singles and hard drive players
More's the pity.The "scientific issue" has a hidden moral angle- a common argument by proponents of embryonic stem cell research is that it's immoral to block such research if such research would result in medical procedures which would alleviate suffering. If the research can be done - and any benefits therefrom gained - using only adult stem cells, then that argument is defused and we don't have to try to answer these questions:
1. Is the amount of suffering which could be alleviated a greater evil than the treatment of embryonic humans as things to be used and destroyed?
2. If so, is it morally right (or morally permissible) to actually commit the lesser evil to prevent the greater?
The article says that "trusted editor" status will be based on number and frequency of Wikipedia edits. I don't know about others, but I think that in many situations I would place considerably less trust in people who are constantly editing Wikipedia as opposed to occasional contributors- as a group they represent a very biased selection of the public at large*, and as individuals they often have agendas they're pushing which represent a major (if not the major) motivation for their continual editing.
*I was about to submit and realized this statement could be misread to mean that they're more biased people than average. That's not what is meant, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_bias.
D is the answer. It's meant to take the good ideas from C++, Java, and C# and make a modernized C-type language which is suitable for systems programming and (relatively) easy to implement.
There's a a GCC frontend) in the works as well. In general, it seems like once this language gets a bit more mindshare it will really take off.
(D is currently #1 on the Great Computer Language Shootout- and while it does help a little that it's the only one with all the tests implemented, its ranking is due to very impressive performance.)
and I for one can see where he's coming from.
When I see how inefficient the road construction around my town is I suspect the city council members must be getting kickbacks from the construction companies. The street I live on, which gets quite a bit of traffic, was resurfaced and repainted. It took the construction crew only a day or so, and the job was adequate. But (I think it's because the contract and kickback scheme must go by the hour) they came back and spent over a week standing around, putting another layer on top of what they had just done without removing anything, and then drilling through this second layer to reach the manholes they had idiotically cemented over. When they left and reopened my street, there was a dropoff of about an inch from the edge of the road surface to the gutters. I didn't complain to the city because I thought it might prompt another weeklong street closure.
Even beyond suspicions of graft, it seems a lot of cities are perfectly willing to tear up and redo a street because somebody suggested the street wasn't aesthetically pleasing enough but completely unwilling to spend another cent on education.
No, it just assumes that whatever IP is licensed is replaceable.
Would it not perhaps be better, given the goals for the card, to first see whether one of the existing 3d companies (Matrox, perhaps?) would be willing, for the right price, to open the IP for an outdated product?
LWN reviews RHEL clones
Unless the GCC documentation is very wrong, the only tree-ssa optimizations in 4.0 which don't get turned on by default at -O3 are -ftree-loop-linear, -ftree-loop-im, -ftree-loop-ivcanon, -fivopts, and -ftree-vectorize. It's true that some of these may be good optimization wins (probably increasing compile time in the process, but that's what the higher optimization levels are all about), but there are plenty of tree-ssa optimization passes being used in these tests.
Auto-vectorization, by the way, does not fall into a "obvious optimization wins which perhaps should be enabled at -O3 by default" category. It can bring very big performance benefits in some situations, but it should be used with caution.
He didn't say if you *run* a lot of programs written in C++, he said if you *compile* a lot of C++. The performance of the generated code is roughly the same (slightly more often worse than better), but the compile time is considerably better. (The review linked to doesn't show this, but that's because it only includes one comparatively small c++ program; other people are showing huge improvements.)
To those saying "it's the legal troubles and fear of Sun": it's true enough that Sun's copyright assignment stance, licensing, etc are responsible for the NeoOffice fork and, to a large extent, the lack of corporate contributions, but the fact that contributors do retain (dual) copyright and that the GPL/LGPL licensing is irrevocable should mitigate that enough for community contributions.
To those saying "Break it up into components, like Moz": I don't think the problem is that OO.org comes as a whole as that the framework on which all of the apps are built is extremely complex.
To a smaller extent, Mozilla did have the same problem. Splitting the suite was a relatively minor (and thus far somewhat uneffective, as the problems with getting a shared GRE show) move for Moz compared with the momentous decision to ditch so much of the NS 4.x- pre5.x codebase in favor of Gecko, Seamonkey, etc. Even after that and years of improvement, Mozilla development is still known as rather difficult to get into well. Cleaning and simplifying the framework of StarOffice will be even harder.
The XGI release is 2d only (the kernel code is for fb support, not DRI), and from what I see on the Unichrome driver effort's mailing list archives the VIA source release is just making available to everyone what has been available through a "developer portal" for some time and does not make any more of the chipsets' features usable.
So the only possible real news here is a shift in the attitudes of these companies. We'll see how that works out in the future (whether enough information is released to allow open-source 3d drivers for XGI and full support for the VIA MPEG enc/dec acceleration).