>...any Republican who's not a male college-educated Caucasian...
Hey! I'm a male college-educated Caucasian! You think the Republican party supports my interests? Pfft. White men are no more all bigoted Republicans than black men are all thuggish gangsters.
I'm not sure that 'procedural' is really what we want. Good textures often involve real source images, for instance.
Wavelets may be more useful to compactly encode textures generated more traditionally, and to provide better upsampling than traditional polynomial interpolation methods (bilinear, etc). Rather than generating points between samples using just the adjacent pixels, points are generated from a sum of wavelets generated by looking at all of the pixels.
An example of an image format that does just this is JPEG2000.
The interesting conclusion is that maybe graphics cards should be manipulating images in the frequency domain instead of as bitmaps.
>Dual cores make it possible to edit still images from digital still cameras, video from MiniDV/MicroDV camcorders, and audio far faster than ever before.
Do you by any chance... work for Intel?;-)
>Actually, right now Intel is leading with their excellent Core 2 Duo CPU's. Extremely fast, very efficient in instructions processed per CPU clock cycle, and decently cool running...
You're right, of course, that Intel is in the lead right now. But that's the whole point: AMD had been in the lead for a while; now Intel is; competition has increased again. Just as you don't want to buy stocks after they've finished going up, you don't want to buy technology until it has leveled off for a bit.
Intel has a few advantages: A more advanced lithography process for instance. But AMD has a better crossbar; Intel just has the cores share the FSB. So I'd like to see Intel improve their architecture and AMD start rolling out chips with a newer process. I can wait for that to happen. For now, what I have is good enough.
>that's why Apple chose the Core 2 Duo for most of their Macintosh line.
Is it? I heard IBM (who was producing the PPC chips) and Apple had a falling out for business and logistical reasons (including pricing). Of course, IBM may be regretting that decision, as they just laid off a bunch of their PPC guys. But then, Intel also had a big round of layofffs -- bigger than IBM's. So it's hard to tell who got the short end of the stick. But whatever it was, I'm pretty sure it was about more than benchmarks.
A lot of posters have said that people aren't buying new PCs because what they have is fast enough. Those posters are right. But there still do exist people who, for whatever reason, would like a new computer. Laptops, for instance, don't last forever.
Those people, if they are wise, are waiting for the dust to settle after the mulicore wars.
Processor technology had been stagnating, but now competition is heating up again between Intel and AMD. If I buy this year, something significantly better may come out the next! I don't expect that high rate-of-change to continue for long, but there is obvious work (like Intel developing a real crossbar) that has to happen before it's over with. I'll wait until they've finished.
There is some evidence that Japan was prepared to surrender. Some hypothesize that we used nukes partly so Stalin could see the results. It's plausible, but I haven't studied it extensively.
>No, it's about preserving our national values and our constitution, something I think is a bit more important and would hope that even "Nerds" have a bit of an interest in.
Exactly. Which is why politics shouldn't be approached like watching football. The parent obviously viewed the article as an attack on Republicans -- "his team." I don't care who overturns the Bill of Rights or the Writ of Habeas Corpus; I care that they're gone. We need more intelligent political discourse.
But "real" isn't the swaggering jock: He is exactly like his counterpart the flamboyant "metrosexual" (how I detest that word -- but it communicates): He is affecting a style of behavior that is not truly his own. I have no respect for him.
Do not be like Napolean, who fought wars to make up for his small stature. It takes the bigger man to show restraint. Master yourself before you seek to master others. Violence is weakness.
Du Toit is correct that the TV-sitcom "man" is weak, hen-pecked, and impotant -- as are too many real life men. But this is not because they do not drink enough beer, and it is not because they do not watch enough football. It is because, chained by guaranteed sex to relationships they do not want, they do not have the strength to hold their principles above their libidos. Restraint is strength.
Take a punch. Stand tall. Do not strike back, but speak clearly: "You will leave now."
Meet a girl. She is drunk, and on top of you. Quietly say, "no." Put her to bed. Close the door behind you.
Whence disappeared "to be a man?" Strength. Respect. Honor. Real men are not pigs. Real men are good men.
>RAR - It's a proprietary compression algorithm with no open-source implementations. Real nerds use open compression schemes.:)
Well, sure, the practical nerd would use ZIP, the traditional nerd would use.tar.gz, and the modern nerd would use BZ2 -- but are you sure there aren't any open implementations of RAR? What about 7-zip?
Political thought should have more to it than rooting for the local sportsteam. This isn't about cheering on a party or hoping the Democrats go to the World Series.
Ooh! Ooh! Biblical references make for great literature! "The protagonist is a Christ figure!!" (If that fails when you write literary criticism, just start throwing the word 'phallus' around. Works every time.)
>Note that the curve is skewed along ages. The [older]an individual is, the more probable that individual is to have genital herpes. (There is no cure. It is chronic. It subsides, but doesn't go away.)
That's a good point.
It does follow from my point #3 as well, since N increases monotonically with age. I'd expect some feedback effects too: Since people tend to have sex with others about their own age, then as a generation ages, the probability of transmission would increase as the prevalence of infection increases and vica versa. I wonder how that differential equation works out; it looks nonlinear. And it sounds bad, but you can spin it to keep the glass half full: To maintain the 25% overall prevalence, lower ages' probabilities must be accordingly lower -- like what you said.
As for optimism: My post was in reply to insanarchist who said that an ignorance of odds may help people to pursue certain activities. I offered this as an example. C'est tout.
>
However more and more people see through the bubble and is more cynical and even anti-American with the progress of media and easier travel and it becomes more clear how things are run overthere and what the mentality of many Americans really is. Many would think Americans are chauvenistic, rude, selfcentered, selfish and arrogant instead of "confident".
Funny you should say that. There are a lot of Americans who feel exactly as you do: It's not uncommon in my experience for Americans to believe that the vast majority of other Americans are unusually stupid or boorish by international standards.
>That's one interpretation, another is that "That guy" was trying to keep a bunch of people under a thumb
The medeival Church certainly pulled that sort of stuff, but in context I don't think you could read that quote like that. In the text of Ecclesiastes, that quote is surrounded by all sorts of despairing thoughts, and is part of a logical progression: The guy is looking for meaning in life, and can't find any.
The fact is, Ecclesiastes isn't a happy book. In fact, it's hardly a religious text. The ending says something to the effect of "So, go and follow Gods Laws," but that ending feels tacked-on, and for all we know it was. Most of the book is rather different: It's like an ancient blog, full of "Life has no meaning" sentiment. But I love it. It's my favorite book in the Bible. Because it's the one book that doesn't feel like it's trying to acheive some ideological or political end: It's just a guy wondering aloud, "What's the point?" As literature, it feels genuine and human.
If you're not being challenged with hard problems, you will be more confident because, of those problems which you have seen, you will have gotten more right.
If you keep getting problems wrong, you get fewer pats on the back, and will be less confident.
Could it be possible that this study just says that US math education is too easy?
Of couples who use only a condom for contraception, 1 out of 5 becomes pregnant within a year.
If an event may occur with probability P in a trial, and there are N trials, then the probability that the event will occur at least once is given by 1-(1-P)^N.
>IINAMHS, but the world's smallest hand be used to build a yet smaller hand?
This is actually an idea described by Feynman in his lecture 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom,' for which he is often cited as being the first to explore the idea of nanotechnology.
Now comes the interesting question: How do we make such a tiny mechanism? I leave that to you. However, let me suggest one weird possibility. You know, in the atomic energy plants they have materials and machines that they can't handle directly because they have become radioactive. To unscrew nuts and put on bolts and so on, they have a set of master and slave hands, so that by operating a set of levers here, you control the ``hands'' there, and can turn them this way and that so you can handle things quite nicely.
[...]
Now, I want to build much the same device---a master-slave system which operates electrically. But I want the slaves to be made especially carefully by modern large-scale machinists so that they are one-fourth the scale of the ``hands'' that you ordinarily maneuver. So you have a scheme by which you can do things at one- quarter scale anyway---the little servo motors with little hands play with little nuts and bolts; they drill little holes; they are four times smaller. Aha! So I manufacture a quarter-size lathe; I manufacture quarter-size tools; and I make, at the one-quarter scale, still another set of hands again relatively one-quarter size! This is one-sixteenth size, from my point of view. And after I finish doing this I wire directly from my large-scale system, through transformers perhaps, to the one-sixteenth-size servo motors. Thus I can now manipulate the one-sixteenth size hands.
>Using your CPU as a space heater is not a bad idea. It is 100% efficient.
Not really. Consider exergy. Yes, your CPU is just as efficient as any electric space heater. However, consider that the alternative is probably burning natural gas or oil in a furnace. If you burn fuel for heat, 90%+ of the chemical energy goes to producing heat (the rest is lost as unburnt hydrocarbons in the exhaust). If you burn fuel to spin a turbine at a power plant, only about 40% goes to electrical energy, and unless it's a cogeneration plant which uses the waste heat for industrial purposes, the rest is lost as heat up the smokestacks. So, starting from the fossil-fuel source, electrical heating is less than half as efficient as burning fuel for heat. If you do need to heat using electric power, it's much more efficient to use that electricity to pump heat in from a lower temperature outside than it is to turn that electricity itself into heat.
If you are stuck with electric (non-heat-pump) heating in your house, however, you are correct: There is absolutely no reason not to run your CPU or any other electrical appliance full tilt.
I always flinch when people talk about intimate relationships in terms of 'skills.' It changes the framing of the coversation: She's no loger a person who I love; there's a "relationship" that I... 'do?' 'Skill' reduces 'having relationships' to an activity to be mastered, like riding a bike or using a machine tool. The word implies exploitation -- that you make a relationship 'work' by having mastered the art of operating people. We acquire skills by practice: Do we wake up in the morning and choose for another day to stay with someone simply because we've "fallen off enough bicycles" to be "good at it?" What might it mean to have "mastered" 'relationship-ing' anyway? To continue to sustain 'a relationship?' What's the inherent good in that?
The word 'skill' connotes 'manipulation.' What it does not connote are genuineness or honesty -- yet those are what are worth seeking. Where is the spark, the humanity, the connection, in 'skill?'
I will leave 'skill' on my resume. Next to words like 'achieve' and 'implement.' And away, I hope, from 'love.'
Slashdot Mirror
+5, Brilliant.
>the gay lifestyle.
There's just one?
>skinny gangsters or crazy Libertarians.
Especially on Slashdot?
>...any Republican who's not a male college-educated Caucasian...
Hey! I'm a male college-educated Caucasian! You think the Republican party supports my interests? Pfft. White men are no more all bigoted Republicans than black men are all thuggish gangsters.
I'm not sure that 'procedural' is really what we want. Good textures often involve real source images, for instance.
Wavelets may be more useful to compactly encode textures generated more traditionally, and to provide better upsampling than traditional polynomial interpolation methods (bilinear, etc). Rather than generating points between samples using just the adjacent pixels, points are generated from a sum of wavelets generated by looking at all of the pixels.
An example of an image format that does just this is JPEG2000.
The interesting conclusion is that maybe graphics cards should be manipulating images in the frequency domain instead of as bitmaps.
>Dual cores make it possible to edit still images from digital still cameras, video from MiniDV/MicroDV camcorders, and audio far faster than ever before.
Do you by any chance... work for Intel? ;-)
>Actually, right now Intel is leading with their excellent Core 2 Duo CPU's. Extremely fast, very efficient in instructions processed per CPU clock cycle, and decently cool running...
You're right, of course, that Intel is in the lead right now. But that's the whole point: AMD had been in the lead for a while; now Intel is; competition has increased again. Just as you don't want to buy stocks after they've finished going up, you don't want to buy technology until it has leveled off for a bit.
Intel has a few advantages: A more advanced lithography process for instance. But AMD has a better crossbar; Intel just has the cores share the FSB. So I'd like to see Intel improve their architecture and AMD start rolling out chips with a newer process. I can wait for that to happen. For now, what I have is good enough.
>that's why Apple chose the Core 2 Duo for most of their Macintosh line.
Is it? I heard IBM (who was producing the PPC chips) and Apple had a falling out for business and logistical reasons (including pricing). Of course, IBM may be regretting that decision, as they just laid off a bunch of their PPC guys. But then, Intel also had a big round of layofffs -- bigger than IBM's. So it's hard to tell who got the short end of the stick. But whatever it was, I'm pretty sure it was about more than benchmarks.
A lot of posters have said that people aren't buying new PCs because what they have is fast enough. Those posters are right. But there still do exist people who, for whatever reason, would like a new computer. Laptops, for instance, don't last forever.
Those people, if they are wise, are waiting for the dust to settle after the mulicore wars.
Processor technology had been stagnating, but now competition is heating up again between Intel and AMD. If I buy this year, something significantly better may come out the next! I don't expect that high rate-of-change to continue for long, but there is obvious work (like Intel developing a real crossbar) that has to happen before it's over with. I'll wait until they've finished.
There is some evidence that Japan was prepared to surrender. Some hypothesize that we used nukes partly so Stalin could see the results. It's plausible, but I haven't studied it extensively.
>No, it's about preserving our national values and our constitution, something I think is a bit more important and would hope that even "Nerds" have a bit of an interest in.
Exactly. Which is why politics shouldn't be approached like watching football. The parent obviously viewed the article as an attack on Republicans -- "his team." I don't care who overturns the Bill of Rights or the Writ of Habeas Corpus; I care that they're gone. We need more intelligent political discourse.
But "real" isn't the swaggering jock: He is exactly like his counterpart the flamboyant "metrosexual" (how I detest that word -- but it communicates): He is affecting a style of behavior that is not truly his own. I have no respect for him.
Do not be like Napolean, who fought wars to make up for his small stature. It takes the bigger man to show restraint. Master yourself before you seek to master others. Violence is weakness.
Du Toit is correct that the TV-sitcom "man" is weak, hen-pecked, and impotant -- as are too many real life men. But this is not because they do not drink enough beer, and it is not because they do not watch enough football. It is because, chained by guaranteed sex to relationships they do not want, they do not have the strength to hold their principles above their libidos. Restraint is strength.
Take a punch. Stand tall. Do not strike back, but speak clearly: "You will leave now."
Meet a girl. She is drunk, and on top of you. Quietly say, "no." Put her to bed. Close the door behind you.
Whence disappeared "to be a man?" Strength. Respect. Honor. Real men are not pigs. Real men are good men.
>RAR - It's a proprietary compression algorithm with no open-source implementations. Real nerds use open compression schemes. :)
Well, sure, the practical nerd would use ZIP, the traditional nerd would use .tar.gz, and the modern nerd would use BZ2 -- but are you sure there aren't any open implementations of RAR? What about 7-zip?
Well, there's always Jeb.
*shudder*
Political thought should have more to it than rooting for the local sportsteam. This isn't about cheering on a party or hoping the Democrats go to the World Series.
Digital? Analog? Why choose? Just keep changing your opinion: A nice fast pulse width modulation is both!
Hey!! I'm an Ivy League scholar, you insensitive clod!!
Anyway, "philosophers" really can be obnoxious, but the real deep end of the bullshit pool is literary criticism.
Ooh! Ooh! Biblical references make for great literature! "The protagonist is a Christ figure!!" (If that fails when you write literary criticism, just start throwing the word 'phallus' around. Works every time.)
We know the how the Firefox team answered that question.
When Microsoft runs out of cake, the Opera team will have to politely ask for the chicken.
>Note that the curve is skewed along ages. The [older]an individual is, the more probable that individual is to have genital herpes. (There is no cure. It is chronic. It subsides, but doesn't go away.)
That's a good point.
It does follow from my point #3 as well, since N increases monotonically with age. I'd expect some feedback effects too: Since people tend to have sex with others about their own age, then as a generation ages, the probability of transmission would increase as the prevalence of infection increases and vica versa. I wonder how that differential equation works out; it looks nonlinear. And it sounds bad, but you can spin it to keep the glass half full: To maintain the 25% overall prevalence, lower ages' probabilities must be accordingly lower -- like what you said.
As for optimism: My post was in reply to insanarchist who said that an ignorance of odds may help people to pursue certain activities. I offered this as an example. C'est tout.
> However more and more people see through the bubble and is more cynical and even anti-American with the progress of media and easier travel and it becomes more clear how things are run overthere and what the mentality of many Americans really is. Many would think Americans are chauvenistic, rude, selfcentered, selfish and arrogant instead of "confident".
Funny you should say that. There are a lot of Americans who feel exactly as you do: It's not uncommon in my experience for Americans to believe that the vast majority of other Americans are unusually stupid or boorish by international standards.
>That's one interpretation, another is that "That guy" was trying to keep a bunch of people under a thumb
The medeival Church certainly pulled that sort of stuff, but in context I don't think you could read that quote like that. In the text of Ecclesiastes, that quote is surrounded by all sorts of despairing thoughts, and is part of a logical progression: The guy is looking for meaning in life, and can't find any.
The fact is, Ecclesiastes isn't a happy book. In fact, it's hardly a religious text. The ending says something to the effect of "So, go and follow Gods Laws," but that ending feels tacked-on, and for all we know it was. Most of the book is rather different: It's like an ancient blog, full of "Life has no meaning" sentiment. But I love it. It's my favorite book in the Bible. Because it's the one book that doesn't feel like it's trying to acheive some ideological or political end: It's just a guy wondering aloud, "What's the point?" As literature, it feels genuine and human.
If you're not being challenged with hard problems, you will be more confident because, of those problems which you have seen, you will have gotten more right.
If you keep getting problems wrong, you get fewer pats on the back, and will be less confident.
Could it be possible that this study just says that US math education is too easy?
A word problem: Given the following facts,
Ignorance == Bliss
>IINAMHS, but the world's smallest hand be used to build a yet smaller hand?
This is actually an idea described by Feynman in his lecture 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom,' for which he is often cited as being the first to explore the idea of nanotechnology.
The text is available here.
I'll quote a little of the applicable bit:
>Using your CPU as a space heater is not a bad idea. It is 100% efficient.
Not really. Consider exergy. Yes, your CPU is just as efficient as any electric space heater. However, consider that the alternative is probably burning natural gas or oil in a furnace. If you burn fuel for heat, 90%+ of the chemical energy goes to producing heat (the rest is lost as unburnt hydrocarbons in the exhaust). If you burn fuel to spin a turbine at a power plant, only about 40% goes to electrical energy, and unless it's a cogeneration plant which uses the waste heat for industrial purposes, the rest is lost as heat up the smokestacks. So, starting from the fossil-fuel source, electrical heating is less than half as efficient as burning fuel for heat. If you do need to heat using electric power, it's much more efficient to use that electricity to pump heat in from a lower temperature outside than it is to turn that electricity itself into heat.
If you are stuck with electric (non-heat-pump) heating in your house, however, you are correct: There is absolutely no reason not to run your CPU or any other electrical appliance full tilt.
I always flinch when people talk about intimate relationships in terms of 'skills.' It changes the framing of the coversation: She's no loger a person who I love; there's a "relationship" that I... 'do?' 'Skill' reduces 'having relationships' to an activity to be mastered, like riding a bike or using a machine tool. The word implies exploitation -- that you make a relationship 'work' by having mastered the art of operating people. We acquire skills by practice: Do we wake up in the morning and choose for another day to stay with someone simply because we've "fallen off enough bicycles" to be "good at it?" What might it mean to have "mastered" 'relationship-ing' anyway? To continue to sustain 'a relationship?' What's the inherent good in that?
The word 'skill' connotes 'manipulation.' What it does not connote are genuineness or honesty -- yet those are what are worth seeking. Where is the spark, the humanity, the connection, in 'skill?'
I will leave 'skill' on my resume. Next to words like 'achieve' and 'implement.' And away, I hope, from 'love.'