The cache is 32MB, which is about 8 songs. You can blow the cache by just selecting a new set of songs to play. The iPod then says "OK Team, we need a new list of things to play," and makes a new list. It won't preferentially pick from the cache. I know that from 3 years of listening to an iPod (and accidentally getting the iPod to play my entire library on shuffle mode).
And I want iTunes to make me a continental breakfast every day by 7 sharp and then clean my house and prepare dinner for when I arrive home.
iTunes is a jukebox program, not your own robotic DJ. iTunes does give the option to weight the play-order based on how long it's been since a song played. Go to your library, turn off "shuffle mode," sort the library by Date Played and play the songs you heard last. In order. There you go. 100% weighting on date played. iTunes doesn't make a note in its database if you've skipped a song because it doesn't include one of those fucking mood rings so it knows what color you are when you want to listen to Kelly Clarkson vs what color you are when you want to listen to Celine Dion. And how can iTunes tell when you heard it too recently? Maybe you just heard a new song, and like it a lot, so you want to hear it a lot. Does iTunes know that? Is iTunes supposed to have a T3 line to Ms. Cleo's brain?
Lastly, iTunes sucks down quite a few cycles even during normal playback. And when it sucks down too many, it bogs down the system. Now, when I have iTunes on random mode, it can also be referred to as "I was iTunes to provide ambient noise for while I am working on other things." And when iTunes starts interefering with that, I get cranky. I like that iTunes does what it is supposed to do, and doesn't try to do everything. If you want something that will wipe your ass for you, find a maid, not a jukebox program.
No, the actual physical object is the volume inside the event horizon. Why is it called a black hole? Because anything that entered the event horizon does not escape. So a black hole is the volume enclosed by the event horizon. The singularity is the extraordinarily dense pit of gravity at the center of a black hole. They are two different things. Defining the size of a black hole by its event horizon is...how it should be done, if you think about it. The "object" in the middle is was causes all the action to happen, but that doesn't make it the only part of a black hole.
Oooh, good point, sir. I really want to form the "Incumbents are Incompetent" Party to boot everybody out of Congress. But I fear that only slashdot members would join. So much for the next great idea in American politics. Or world politics...
I don't know about Yorkfield, but on Core 2, all of the cache is mappable by either core. So you could have one 1 core using 3536 KB of cache and the other using 512. And even better, if you close your web browser and open something more memory intensive, like an encoder, the amount of cache allocated to each will dynamically change.
If it's part of an SDK, then how the hell can a developer NOT include it in his application. When you link against a library (and what do you think an SDK is?) you are included the (necessary) functions in that library in your application. Holy Shit Batman. Don't use SDKs or you'll get sued by the company that wrote (and then copyrighted) the SDK. So even if Microsoft finds copyrighted code, how can they be sure that this code was manually taken out by the "hacker" (I prefer the term "liberator")?
However, bus architecture stayed the same between the 80s and today. If the concept of a bus changes (what Intel is aiming to do with its Through Silicon Vias), then who knows how much that design can be optimized and what "multiplier" we can get out of it?
I love how people say things that are absolutely unknowable ("The biggest improvements that can be made") with such surety. If quantum computing ends up working out (and like you really really think that it won't), wouldn't that be a biggest improvement? Or, you know, to play "Let's imagine the future" what's to keep someone, someday, from figuring out a freaky way to tap entanglement to usher in an era of chips that don't need buses because memory is entangled with atoms in the processor?
If they are not getting more complex, how did they get more complex in the past, say from going from prokaryotes to eukaryotes? Well, I believe that most people on slashdot would stroke their beards and mumble something along the lines of, "Hmmm, sounds like a case for evolution to me." So, if they started out simpler (can we agree on that), and are now complex (which you agree with), how did they get that way? They grew more complex, via whatever mechanism you want to call it: evolution, intelligent redesign, My Theory of Changes Happening Every Tuesday, whatever. So if they grew more complex in the past, why would they have stopped now? No, biological systems are getting more complex every day because in the real world, if you want a system (any system) to have more functionality, then it has to get more complex. That's true for anything. And as living systems change/evolve/whatever to have more functionality (like adapting to a new environment), they will continue to grow more complex, just as they have in the past. I had no truck with your talk of software. I had a problem with you saying that living things aren't getting more complex.
Methinks you either slept through your college biology lecture, or just decided it wasn't worth going to. This is a diagram of one facet of a cell's existence, eating. Just that one thing, and there are hundreds of little dots, each of which stand for an enzyme. Then, in multicellular organisms, you have all the signaling pathways (which are multistage...think the 7 layers of the TCP/IP protocol) that is necessary for cells to interact, as well as the massive transport system with THREE different types of transport vesicles...
Then, if you think about the code for cells...in "evolved" eukaryotes, there are not only long sequences of DNA inserted from viruses ages ago, there are copies of genes that just don't work because they're mutated. Talk about junk code. But those sequences are dutifully preserved inside your very cells. It's a nightmare that even Microsoft would hate to dream.
Heya Yogi! Doing that would in no way ruin your transmission. They are designed for that kind of usage, unlike braking systems. So, IMHO, its better to not replace anything than replace brakes.
This is not in any way an issue for the corporations to fight out because the corporations in this case are the "content providers" (read: restrictors) who will bend you over and fuck you blind if you leave them to their own devices. As a consequence of the "free" world embracing capitalism, nothing is free anymore. Companies, and by induction, corporations, are required by law (called Feduciary Responsibility) to make as much money as possible. It is the reason that one of the basic tenets of copyright, to spread ideas (not restrict or manage) has been so violated everywhere; it is also the reason that we don't have cars that reach 50 mpg or that something called "designed obsolesence" was invented.
I agree, governments should be public servants, and that is why they need to rule, legislate and enforce a new copyright system that serves the public by preventing the IP outrages like this that occur all the time.
But with that (ludicrous) background update feature? I was in a lecture where the professor was using a computer for a presentation. In the middle of this presentation, the Windows Update dialog popped up saying that updates had *just* been installed and commanding a restart. Of course, the professor could not restart then, so he clicked cancel. He finished the interactive part of the lecture, but kept a slide of information open for reference while he did some board work. While busy at the board, the "I'm rebooting in 5 minutes. Try to stop me" dialog window popped up. He had to be interrupted by a student in order to save from an inconvenient restart.
So what that proves is you cannot make a generalization about this. There are times when users should be able to tell windows "STFU already. Listen, I didn't ask you to update, and I'm not able to restart to bugger off."
I'm calling shenanigans on that. Minimum MPG on cars, a Do Not Call list or even consumer protections do not deal with human rights, they deal with human conveniences. And frankly, another entitled human convenience that I (and obviously that everyone else on slashdot) want is DRM-free music. And a severe lack of DCMA, which is a human pain in the ass.
And on a whole other level, the "content" "providers" do not have a right to laden content they are SELLING (not even licensing, but SELLING) to consumers with DRM.
So basically I'd need at least a 4Mbit ADSL/Cable connection
Or, I mean, maybe you could use it as its intended, i.e. on a network, streaming video from a computer/device on the network. I don't think this is 1985 anymore. 10BaseT ethernet has gone the way of the horsed carriage to make room for the horseless carriage that is 11 or 54 Mbps wireless technology. You have plenty of bandwidth, if you use the iTV as it is intended to be used.
And perhaps you have never experienced, but with the digital cable I have watched (Comcast and Adelphia), there is a definite (on the order of 1 second) pause before a station starts to play. No "buffering" message pops up, but what do you think the cable box is doing? Would your dad return the cable box because his tv station takes any extra second to tune?
No, its not wrong at all. The "admin" group on OS X are users who are allowed to sudo. Others cannot use sudo. Users in the admin groups are admin. They're not root, but they can use sudo. Its just like admin accounts on any linux box. I don't see what the problem calling the account an admin account, seeing as they are in the group admin and fulfill the same role.
I believe you misunderstand. sudo is a command that takes a user listed in the sudoers file and gives them root priviledges. In a default OS X install, only admins are in the sudoers file. There are three levels of access in OS X: unpriviledged user, admin and root. Only admins may be promoted to root through sudo. If your password works for the installer, you are an admin.
If you get prompted for you password whenever you install something, or move something into/Applications, and YOUR password works, then you are an admin. The password that the box is looking for is an administrator password (and even says so, if you read it).
You can tip your hat to American ingenuity as long as you know that, as Tom Lehrer once said, "good old American Know-how" is "provided by good old Americans by Dr. Werner Von Braun." Honestly, these sorts of things have been used in Europe (of all Communist, apple-pie hating places) for decades. So while your hat is tipped, you might as well give a small bow to the Europeans.
Three or four people have brought up the idea that problem would work well for the cell processor. But I don't think anyone has really seen the (rays of) light on the issue. The Cell is perfect for this. Some facts:
1) Raytracing is highly vectorized. The Cell's many processors are optimized for vector calculations.
2) Raytracing scales linearly with the number of cores. The Cell has 8 (at least in its current manifestation).
3) The Cell is already available as a PCI-Express add-in card (that even runs linux!) which sounds awfully like what a GPU is...
4) The Cell is a bitch to program. But then, so are GPUs...so maybe it's not that ridiculous to see the future of the GPU...from IBM.
How ironic it is that Intel is now pushing this technology...
GAs aren't inefficient. A powerful computer can chug through billions of "births" a day. Additionally, GAs are set to have a higher rate of mutation than real life. So really, they just speed up "evolution" and while they might not be the fastest logically (you might think it would be better to intelligently pick which mutations to make), you can perform the random mutations a lot faster, so it's all a wash in the end.
Your view on genetic algorithms is just plain wrong.
One of the reasons that "Intelligent Design" is so palatable to so many people is that nature and life are so damn complex. There is a textbook called Molecular Biology of the Cell; this book's aim is to precisely define the chemical pathways and biological structures that constitute a living cell, and it is roughly 2000 pages long. It is still outrageously incomplete. This massive tome is looking at something that is so incredibly minute that you are formed by trillions of them. It takes a 2000 page book to incompletely describe the simplest part of you. What is mind-boggling to many people (and simply awe-inspiring to the rest) is that such a simple rule as "survival of the fittest/random mutation" could create so complex a system. The fact is, such complexity is inherent in the system, and that complexity arises out of simplicity. A great tutorial on that is Cellular Automata.
Now, you do bring up an interesting point about the positive feedback loop that our brains have created with technology. But if you extend your scenario to a few years after "The Almighty CAD Program" is designed, you may indeed reach that technological singularity, where a machine can design another machine inside a CAD program, and, a few years later, might be able to either make that machine with the automated robots already used for assembly, or even emulate it with its own hardware. Now you have reached the point where "genetic algorithms" are doing exactly what you have claimed they cannot. Genetic algorithms only tackle problems in a simple problem state because they have not been allowed to evolve enough. Bacteria are much simpler than humans, and they also first came around billions of years ago. After nature had time to evolve from the bacteria, it got more and more complex. So too will genetic algorithms.
Violence can be a very, very powerful tool. However, just like that 10,000 RPM, 20-inch circular saw in my shop, it can also be very, very dangerous for the user. Gandhi and Martin Luther King showed just how easy it is to use nonviolence in the face of violence to solve a situation. Violence, like any tool, can only be used for certain things. There is no way that I'm going to dice my veggies (or hell, slice my 2-inch he-man-steak) with it. Intelligently applied violence and coercion will breed out neither stupidity nor pacifism. Look at the number of stupid people in the world...I mean, really. But the biggest logical flaw you've made is to assume that humans are aggressive and ONLY aggressive. We also have a terrible compassionate streak. That's why, in an utterly darwinian sense, humans are unfit for survival. We have made it our crusade to enable people with great disabilities, both physical and genetic, to not only reproduce, but to continue sucking up resources.
So basically, neither you nor the above comment are spot on: both are just stridently opinionated.
Slashdot Mirror
The cache is 32MB, which is about 8 songs. You can blow the cache by just selecting a new set of songs to play. The iPod then says "OK Team, we need a new list of things to play," and makes a new list. It won't preferentially pick from the cache. I know that from 3 years of listening to an iPod (and accidentally getting the iPod to play my entire library on shuffle mode).
And I want iTunes to make me a continental breakfast every day by 7 sharp and then clean my house and prepare dinner for when I arrive home.
iTunes is a jukebox program, not your own robotic DJ. iTunes does give the option to weight the play-order based on how long it's been since a song played. Go to your library, turn off "shuffle mode," sort the library by Date Played and play the songs you heard last. In order. There you go. 100% weighting on date played. iTunes doesn't make a note in its database if you've skipped a song because it doesn't include one of those fucking mood rings so it knows what color you are when you want to listen to Kelly Clarkson vs what color you are when you want to listen to Celine Dion. And how can iTunes tell when you heard it too recently? Maybe you just heard a new song, and like it a lot, so you want to hear it a lot. Does iTunes know that? Is iTunes supposed to have a T3 line to Ms. Cleo's brain?
Lastly, iTunes sucks down quite a few cycles even during normal playback. And when it sucks down too many, it bogs down the system. Now, when I have iTunes on random mode, it can also be referred to as "I was iTunes to provide ambient noise for while I am working on other things." And when iTunes starts interefering with that, I get cranky. I like that iTunes does what it is supposed to do, and doesn't try to do everything. If you want something that will wipe your ass for you, find a maid, not a jukebox program.
No, the actual physical object is the volume inside the event horizon. Why is it called a black hole? Because anything that entered the event horizon does not escape. So a black hole is the volume enclosed by the event horizon. The singularity is the extraordinarily dense pit of gravity at the center of a black hole. They are two different things. Defining the size of a black hole by its event horizon is...how it should be done, if you think about it. The "object" in the middle is was causes all the action to happen, but that doesn't make it the only part of a black hole.
Oooh, good point, sir. I really want to form the "Incumbents are Incompetent" Party to boot everybody out of Congress. But I fear that only slashdot members would join. So much for the next great idea in American politics. Or world politics...
I don't know about Yorkfield, but on Core 2, all of the cache is mappable by either core. So you could have one 1 core using 3536 KB of cache and the other using 512. And even better, if you close your web browser and open something more memory intensive, like an encoder, the amount of cache allocated to each will dynamically change.
If it's part of an SDK, then how the hell can a developer NOT include it in his application. When you link against a library (and what do you think an SDK is?) you are included the (necessary) functions in that library in your application. Holy Shit Batman. Don't use SDKs or you'll get sued by the company that wrote (and then copyrighted) the SDK. So even if Microsoft finds copyrighted code, how can they be sure that this code was manually taken out by the "hacker" (I prefer the term "liberator")?
However, bus architecture stayed the same between the 80s and today. If the concept of a bus changes (what Intel is aiming to do with its Through Silicon Vias), then who knows how much that design can be optimized and what "multiplier" we can get out of it?
I love how people say things that are absolutely unknowable ("The biggest improvements that can be made") with such surety. If quantum computing ends up working out (and like you really really think that it won't), wouldn't that be a biggest improvement? Or, you know, to play "Let's imagine the future" what's to keep someone, someday, from figuring out a freaky way to tap entanglement to usher in an era of chips that don't need buses because memory is entangled with atoms in the processor?
If they are not getting more complex, how did they get more complex in the past, say from going from prokaryotes to eukaryotes? Well, I believe that most people on slashdot would stroke their beards and mumble something along the lines of, "Hmmm, sounds like a case for evolution to me." So, if they started out simpler (can we agree on that), and are now complex (which you agree with), how did they get that way? They grew more complex, via whatever mechanism you want to call it: evolution, intelligent redesign, My Theory of Changes Happening Every Tuesday, whatever. So if they grew more complex in the past, why would they have stopped now? No, biological systems are getting more complex every day because in the real world, if you want a system (any system) to have more functionality, then it has to get more complex. That's true for anything. And as living systems change/evolve/whatever to have more functionality (like adapting to a new environment), they will continue to grow more complex, just as they have in the past. I had no truck with your talk of software. I had a problem with you saying that living things aren't getting more complex.
Methinks you either slept through your college biology lecture, or just decided it wasn't worth going to. This is a diagram of one facet of a cell's existence, eating. Just that one thing, and there are hundreds of little dots, each of which stand for an enzyme. Then, in multicellular organisms, you have all the signaling pathways (which are multistage...think the 7 layers of the TCP/IP protocol) that is necessary for cells to interact, as well as the massive transport system with THREE different types of transport vesicles...
Then, if you think about the code for cells...in "evolved" eukaryotes, there are not only long sequences of DNA inserted from viruses ages ago, there are copies of genes that just don't work because they're mutated. Talk about junk code. But those sequences are dutifully preserved inside your very cells. It's a nightmare that even Microsoft would hate to dream.
Heya Yogi! Doing that would in no way ruin your transmission. They are designed for that kind of usage, unlike braking systems. So, IMHO, its better to not replace anything than replace brakes.
This is not in any way an issue for the corporations to fight out because the corporations in this case are the "content providers" (read: restrictors) who will bend you over and fuck you blind if you leave them to their own devices. As a consequence of the "free" world embracing capitalism, nothing is free anymore. Companies, and by induction, corporations, are required by law (called Feduciary Responsibility) to make as much money as possible. It is the reason that one of the basic tenets of copyright, to spread ideas (not restrict or manage) has been so violated everywhere; it is also the reason that we don't have cars that reach 50 mpg or that something called "designed obsolesence" was invented.
I agree, governments should be public servants, and that is why they need to rule, legislate and enforce a new copyright system that serves the public by preventing the IP outrages like this that occur all the time.
But with that (ludicrous) background update feature? I was in a lecture where the professor was using a computer for a presentation. In the middle of this presentation, the Windows Update dialog popped up saying that updates had *just* been installed and commanding a restart. Of course, the professor could not restart then, so he clicked cancel. He finished the interactive part of the lecture, but kept a slide of information open for reference while he did some board work. While busy at the board, the "I'm rebooting in 5 minutes. Try to stop me" dialog window popped up. He had to be interrupted by a student in order to save from an inconvenient restart.
So what that proves is you cannot make a generalization about this. There are times when users should be able to tell windows "STFU already. Listen, I didn't ask you to update, and I'm not able to restart to bugger off."
I'm calling shenanigans on that. Minimum MPG on cars, a Do Not Call list or even consumer protections do not deal with human rights, they deal with human conveniences. And frankly, another entitled human convenience that I (and obviously that everyone else on slashdot) want is DRM-free music. And a severe lack of DCMA, which is a human pain in the ass.
And on a whole other level, the "content" "providers" do not have a right to laden content they are SELLING (not even licensing, but SELLING) to consumers with DRM.
Or, I mean, maybe you could use it as its intended, i.e. on a network, streaming video from a computer/device on the network. I don't think this is 1985 anymore. 10BaseT ethernet has gone the way of the horsed carriage to make room for the horseless carriage that is 11 or 54 Mbps wireless technology. You have plenty of bandwidth, if you use the iTV as it is intended to be used.
And perhaps you have never experienced, but with the digital cable I have watched (Comcast and Adelphia), there is a definite (on the order of 1 second) pause before a station starts to play. No "buffering" message pops up, but what do you think the cable box is doing? Would your dad return the cable box because his tv station takes any extra second to tune?
Thank you for taking my comment out of context. Either your a lawyer are Karl Rove. Good job! :-)
No, its not wrong at all. The "admin" group on OS X are users who are allowed to sudo. Others cannot use sudo. Users in the admin groups are admin. They're not root, but they can use sudo. Its just like admin accounts on any linux box. I don't see what the problem calling the account an admin account, seeing as they are in the group admin and fulfill the same role.
I was responding to the fact that the parent thought that a non-admin could become root. That isn't true.
I believe you misunderstand. sudo is a command that takes a user listed in the sudoers file and gives them root priviledges. In a default OS X install, only admins are in the sudoers file. There are three levels of access in OS X: unpriviledged user, admin and root. Only admins may be promoted to root through sudo. If your password works for the installer, you are an admin.
If you get prompted for you password whenever you install something, or move something into /Applications, and YOUR password works, then you are an admin. The password that the box is looking for is an administrator password (and even says so, if you read it).
You can tip your hat to American ingenuity as long as you know that, as Tom Lehrer once said, "good old American Know-how" is "provided by good old Americans by Dr. Werner Von Braun." Honestly, these sorts of things have been used in Europe (of all Communist, apple-pie hating places) for decades. So while your hat is tipped, you might as well give a small bow to the Europeans.
Well, there are some people (shock!!) who don't have slashdot accounts. The only way they can post is by being an AC.
The Cell Processor
Three or four people have brought up the idea that problem would work well for the cell processor. But I don't think anyone has really seen the (rays of) light on the issue. The Cell is perfect for this. Some facts:
1) Raytracing is highly vectorized. The Cell's many processors are optimized for vector calculations.
2) Raytracing scales linearly with the number of cores. The Cell has 8 (at least in its current manifestation).
3) The Cell is already available as a PCI-Express add-in card (that even runs linux!) which sounds awfully like what a GPU is... 4) The Cell is a bitch to program. But then, so are GPUs...so maybe it's not that ridiculous to see the future of the GPU...from IBM.
How ironic it is that Intel is now pushing this technology...
GAs aren't inefficient. A powerful computer can chug through billions of "births" a day. Additionally, GAs are set to have a higher rate of mutation than real life. So really, they just speed up "evolution" and while they might not be the fastest logically (you might think it would be better to intelligently pick which mutations to make), you can perform the random mutations a lot faster, so it's all a wash in the end.
Your view on genetic algorithms is just plain wrong.
One of the reasons that "Intelligent Design" is so palatable to so many people is that nature and life are so damn complex. There is a textbook called Molecular Biology of the Cell; this book's aim is to precisely define the chemical pathways and biological structures that constitute a living cell, and it is roughly 2000 pages long. It is still outrageously incomplete. This massive tome is looking at something that is so incredibly minute that you are formed by trillions of them. It takes a 2000 page book to incompletely describe the simplest part of you. What is mind-boggling to many people (and simply awe-inspiring to the rest) is that such a simple rule as "survival of the fittest/random mutation" could create so complex a system. The fact is, such complexity is inherent in the system, and that complexity arises out of simplicity. A great tutorial on that is Cellular Automata.
Now, you do bring up an interesting point about the positive feedback loop that our brains have created with technology. But if you extend your scenario to a few years after "The Almighty CAD Program" is designed, you may indeed reach that technological singularity, where a machine can design another machine inside a CAD program, and, a few years later, might be able to either make that machine with the automated robots already used for assembly, or even emulate it with its own hardware. Now you have reached the point where "genetic algorithms" are doing exactly what you have claimed they cannot. Genetic algorithms only tackle problems in a simple problem state because they have not been allowed to evolve enough. Bacteria are much simpler than humans, and they also first came around billions of years ago. After nature had time to evolve from the bacteria, it got more and more complex. So too will genetic algorithms.
Violence can be a very, very powerful tool. However, just like that 10,000 RPM, 20-inch circular saw in my shop, it can also be very, very dangerous for the user. Gandhi and Martin Luther King showed just how easy it is to use nonviolence in the face of violence to solve a situation. Violence, like any tool, can only be used for certain things. There is no way that I'm going to dice my veggies (or hell, slice my 2-inch he-man-steak) with it. Intelligently applied violence and coercion will breed out neither stupidity nor pacifism. Look at the number of stupid people in the world...I mean, really. But the biggest logical flaw you've made is to assume that humans are aggressive and ONLY aggressive. We also have a terrible compassionate streak. That's why, in an utterly darwinian sense, humans are unfit for survival. We have made it our crusade to enable people with great disabilities, both physical and genetic, to not only reproduce, but to continue sucking up resources.
So basically, neither you nor the above comment are spot on: both are just stridently opinionated.