Sure they do. On my computer, there's an infinite stream of ethernet frames arriving, an infinite stream of video frames leaving, an infinite stream of keyboard events arriving, etc.
story645:Can I believe it having gone to a shiny magnet (US world news #20) high school and then honor's program deal... because for me (and plenty of others) we're motivated enough that parental interference does more harm than good. Most of the kid's I know have very hands off parents (hell, a few have parent's who weren't even in the city/state/country) and it doesn't matter
May we assume that the "smart innovative kids" in your "US world news #20 honor's program" skipped the part about how to turn English nouns from their singular forms into their plural forms?
And here she is as Governorette of Alaska, sitting on a Grizzly Bear couch, with a stuffed King Crab on the coffee table, wearing flip flops and red toenail polish to work:
My bad - when something is this irrational, I guess the first suspicion should be politics - instead, I had simply assumed incompetence [or insouciance or absence of inquisitiveness] on the part of the author.
The biggest debate in all of graphics-dom [graphixery?] for the last six months or a year has been Ray Tracing -vs- Rasterization.
So what happened?
I just don't understand how you can have an article about next-generation GPU tech and not ask whether the logic gates & data busses are going to be optimized for Ray Tracing or for Rasterization or for both [which would require at least twice the silicon, if not twice the wattage and twice the heat dispensation].
Has Intel completely abandoned the idea of optimizing silicon for Ray Tracing, and returned to what essentially amounts to software-based graphics, or is there a "Field Programmable" aspect to Larrabee which would allow someone [the programmer who writes the driver, maybe?] to choose how he wants the silicon to be optimized?
Remember, when you're doing highly technical writing like that, you're literally out at [or beyond] the top 1% of 1%.
The sad truth of the matter is that the servicing of highly technical writers just isn't a very big market [and, barring something like artificial manipulation of the genome, will NEVER amount to a very big market], and you're gonna be lucky if anyone bothers to release a product for it.
Heck, we mathies ought to count our lucky stars that Knuth ever took the time to design TeX in the first place.
What's even more interesting to me is that you then post a story that has less to do with race and more to do with poverty.
No - what the article has to do with is race and CRIME.
Memphis is a hoodlum town, run by a bunch of hoodlum families like the Fords.
In re the original story which prompted this thread at Slashdot, the whistle-blowing blogger is trying to "blow the whistle" on these hoodlums, and Godwin is responding by leveraging the courts to deny the blogger his 1st Amendment rights [both freedom of speech and freedom of the press].
If you were a real "liberal", then you'd be all over these violations of the 1st Amendment like, ah - may I say it? - white on rice.
PS: You also said I think you should be modded flamebait instead of interesting, which is exactly how leftists always respond to speech that they don't like it: Deny it, suppress it, extinguish it, eradicate it, and pretend that it never existed in the first place.
Not with tax money. The city council has a fiduciary duty to the people of Memphis to keep this asshole from wasting their money litigating over his hurt feelings.
I know this won't go down well with the libs at Slashdot, but Godwin is an African-American:
.
And, again, to infuriate the libs at Slashdot even further, if the sentences are grammatically correct and if the spelling is correct at the blogsite, then the blogger is almost certainly Caucasian.
So, in reality, this is probably a racial matter which is being disguised a privacy/right-to-know controversy.
And if you want to read about the disastrous state of racial affairs in the town of Memphis, then check out this lengthy expose from the Atlantic:
American Murder Mystery
Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades.
by Hanna Rosin
July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200807/memphis-crime
...Janikowski began working with the police department in 1997, the same year that Barnes saw the car with the bullet holes. He initially consulted on a program to reduce sexual assaults citywide and quickly made himself useful. He mapped all the incidents and noticed a pattern: many assaults happened outside convenience stores, to women using pay phones that were hidden from view. The police asked store owners to move the phones inside, and the number of assaults fell significantly.
About five years ago, Janikowski embarked on a more ambitious project. He'd built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. "These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing," he said, so he wanted to look into it.
When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged: Wait a minute, he recalled thinking. I see this bunny rabbit coming up. People are going to accuse me of being on shrooms! The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city (the bunny rabbit's ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail). Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.
Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn't been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government's most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city's public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal "Section8" rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.
If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents' privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski
All right, I admit, it's been a while since I wrote any "C".
In the old days, the standard was that "p" was an array pointer if and only if "p == &p" [for malloc'ed, or malloc-able, pointers, in general, "p != &p"].
Having said that, I vaguely remember that for character arrays, in some implementations of compiled "C", you could count on an extra eight bits of 0's [i.e. "00000000"] immediately at the end of the array, and if you could move the array pointer over by one and read that "zero byte" [without throwing a segmentation fault in user mode], then you'd know that you had hit the end of the [character] array.
But I don't know of anything in the ANSI or IEEE standards which states that e.g. a 32-bit int array ends in 32-bits worth of 0's [since that actually is a valid 32-bit int, namely "0" itself], nor have I ever heard that e.g. the 64-bit value of all 0's was reserved in IEEE 754 to signify the end of an array of 64-bit doubles.
"Do you know how to find the midpoint of an array, without knowing the total # of elements"
Okay, I assume the language is C.
What does a raw "C" pointer give you?
If you're writing in kernel mode, the C-language [and its compiled implementations] won't even reliably throw a segmentation fault if you go past the end of the "malloc'ed" territory [otherwise strcpy() wouldn't be hax0rable to produce buffer overflows - although maybe the problem is that the kernel-ish aspects of strcpy() use an even more simplistic memory structure than what you get with malloc()].
If it were a file pointer, then you I guess you might be able to rely on EOF, but I don't know of any generalized "EOF" for malloc [at least not in old-school C - maybe one of the more recent ANSI standards has added something new that I don't know about].
And in this day and age, when even medium-sized businesses can be sitting on literally terabytes of data, how are you going to upload all of that data to "The Cloud" so that "The Cloud" can analyze it for you?
Maintaining a constant 10Mbps WAN connection to "The Cloud" would be monstrously expensive, and yet, at 10Mbps = (10 / 8)MBps = 1.25MBps, that means you would need
.
In this day and age - when hardware is essentially worthless [today, for under $200, you can get what would have been a $10 million supercomputer ten years ago], and when even RDBs are essentially worthless [MySQL & PostgreSQL being free downloads], the only things which add value are:
.
1) Your schema [or your customizations of the vendor's standard template of the schema for your industry], and
2) Your business logic for manipulating the schema [or your customizations of the vendor's standard template of the business logic for your industry], and
3) The actual data in your database, and
4) Your algorithms for analyzing the data in your database [or your customizations of the vendor's standard template of the analysis algorithms for your industry].
Of those, at least 1), 3), and 4) are going to have to be uploaded to "The Cloud" [and 2) might have to at least interact with "The Cloud"], and unless "The Cloud" encrypts everything - both data & logic [and how do you really "encrypt" something if ultimately the registers in the CPU have to see unencrypted data, and especially unencrypted logic & algorithms?] - then you've just uploaded the crown jewels of your entire enterprise for all the world to see.
In general I would agree with that advice - it's no fun [and certainly not productivity enhancing] to be in an environment where people are playing games and keeping secrets from one another.
The big exception I would make, however, is if you get even a whiff of the remotest possibility that your job might be under the magnifying glass as far as elimination is concerned.
If existing employee dude is in his late 40's, pulling down $150,000 a year, and if his healthcare costs are about to leap into the stratosphere as he enters his 50's, and if brand-spanking new employee dude is in his early 20's, and willing to work for a fraction of that [say $50,000], with almost no healthcare costs whatsoever, and if existing employee dude senses that there really isn't enough excess work lying around to justify the new hire, and if he suspects that the suits might be grooming brand-spanking new employee dude as his successor, then it might be time for existing employee dude to become a little less helpful to people, and a little more indispensable to them instead - if for no other reason than to buy a little time to figure out a game plan for what to do after his position is eliminated.
I can't open the thing in Windows Media Player, I can't open it in Real Player, and Digital Media Converter is telling me that I have to install Quacktime before it will convert the thing.
And I fscking refuse to install Quacktime.
FSCK THIS SHIZNAT.
AND FSCK THESE TAX-PAYER SUBSIDIZED, STEVE-JOBS'S-@$$-KISSING C*CKSUCKERS WHO ENCODE TO THIS PROPRIETARY SHIZNAT.
My recollection is that MSFT was dragging their feet on the introduction of a "mainstream" 64-bit Windows for literally years and that the AMD people were screaming bloody murder about it, and that "mainstream" Win64 only miraculously appeared at about exactly the same time that Intel was ready to release EM64T, so that, as a result, AMD completely lost their chance for a competitive advantage.
Now if my memory is faulty, then have at it - but I'm pretty sure that that's the way it went down [and no, I don't feel like Googling the dates - I seem to recall that there was a very buggy AMD64 Windows 2003 Server for a while, which got almost no traction in the marketplace, and then AMD64 Windows XP coincided more with the release of EM64T - whereas, by contrast, there had been an IA64 Windows XP for Itanium all the way back in 2001, which probably sold all of about 2 or 3 copies worldwide].
PS: Whether MSFT deliberately dragged their feet as a favor to Intel, or whether the AMD people bungled the corporate negotiations to get MSFT to port to AMD64, I know not, but I definitely remember that there was a good year or 18 months when all you could run on AMD64 was Linux or FreeBSD, and that was precisely the year or 18 months that AMD needed to seize control of the marketplace [which opportunity, as we have since seen, has been lost forever - or at least until the marketplace decides to switch from 64-bit to 128-bit address spaces, and someone else gets a chance to upstage Intel].
Moral of the story being that the greatest hardware in the world is utterly worthless without useable, productivity-enhancing software to run on it.
There is no inspiration in replacing "We don't know yet" with "God did it." Replacing one unknown (the universe's beginning) with another unknown (supernatural deity) is intellectual sloth.
Intellectual sloth is making the assumption that "God did it" and "We don't know [how] yet" are mutually incompatible propositions.
Or even the more simplistic assumption, "God exists", ergo "God did it", but that's probably too subtle a point to be introducing on Slashdot.
Anyway, my reason for posting my original remarks had nothing to do with questions of rigor, but rather with the frankly subhuman cruelty of burdening a young, fragile, innocent creature with such a manifestly horrible, nihilistic, suicidal outlook on life.
Within the next decade, expect this poor girl to show up in the local emergency room with slashed wrists.
I've explained, in general terms, our family's non-religious views on the subject of creation and the Big Bang.
What a horribly desperate and hopeless outlook on life with which to burden a child.
And people wonder why kids these days are on Prozac?
Although the contrarian in me wonders if all these "Miracle of the Random-Completely-Unintelligent-and-Without-Any-Design-Whatsoever Creation Plus Bonus Ginzu Knives & We'll Also Throw in the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" movies might just light a certain spark in the poor girl - at least if they're as "inspirational" as some of the posters here seem to think.
The Non-Existent One is, after all, alleged to work in mysterious ways...
Good grief, people, this is Slashdot: The guy was working on INFORMATION THEORETIC approaches to quantum mechanics [and coming up with all sorts of bizarre contradictions therein] when he was in his 70's & 80's [i.e. at an age when most people are going senile].
Researchers Linda Smith and Chen Yu attempted to teach 28 children, 12 to 14 months old, six words by showing them two objects at a time on a computer monitor while two pre-recorded words were read to them. No information was given regarding which word went with which image.
Serious question: How do you get these babies to give informed consent to having their brains tossed around like salad?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure they do. On my computer, there's an infinite stream of ethernet frames arriving, an infinite stream of video frames leaving, an infinite stream of keyboard events arriving, etc.
1988 just called - it wants its reputation back.
story645: Can I believe it having gone to a shiny magnet (US world news #20) high school and then honor's program deal... because for me (and plenty of others) we're motivated enough that parental interference does more harm than good. Most of the kid's I know have very hands off parents (hell, a few have parent's who weren't even in the city/state/country) and it doesn't matter
May we assume that the "smart innovative kids" in your "US world news #20 honor's program" skipped the part about how to turn English nouns from their singular forms into their plural forms?
Dude, remind me again what we are "in danger of" here?
"In danger of" falling head-over-heals in love?
Here she is as the starting point guard on the state championship women's basketball team [playing with a STRESS FRACTURE, no less]:
.
Here she is early in her career as a sportscasterette:
And here she is as Governorette of Alaska, sitting on a Grizzly Bear couch, with a stuffed King Crab on the coffee table, wearing flip flops and red toenail polish to work:
Again, I ask you in all seriousness - what's not to like here?
I'm not even sure that Angelina Jolie is qualified to play this chick in the movie version, and AJ played Lara Croft, for Goodness's sake.
My bad - when something is this irrational, I guess the first suspicion should be politics - instead, I had simply assumed incompetence [or insouciance or absence of inquisitiveness] on the part of the author.
I will work to up my cynicism.
The biggest debate in all of graphics-dom [graphixery?] for the last six months or a year has been Ray Tracing -vs- Rasterization.
So what happened?
I just don't understand how you can have an article about next-generation GPU tech and not ask whether the logic gates & data busses are going to be optimized for Ray Tracing or for Rasterization or for both [which would require at least twice the silicon, if not twice the wattage and twice the heat dispensation].
Has Intel completely abandoned the idea of optimizing silicon for Ray Tracing, and returned to what essentially amounts to software-based graphics, or is there a "Field Programmable" aspect to Larrabee which would allow someone [the programmer who writes the driver, maybe?] to choose how he wants the silicon to be optimized?
Neither the summary nor TFA itself mentions the words "Ray Tracing" or "Rasterization".
Am I missing something here?
Remember, when you're doing highly technical writing like that, you're literally out at [or beyond] the top 1% of 1%.
The sad truth of the matter is that the servicing of highly technical writers just isn't a very big market [and, barring something like artificial manipulation of the genome, will NEVER amount to a very big market], and you're gonna be lucky if anyone bothers to release a product for it.
Heck, we mathies ought to count our lucky stars that Knuth ever took the time to design TeX in the first place.
What's even more interesting to me is that you then post a story that has less to do with race and more to do with poverty.
No - what the article has to do with is race and CRIME.
Memphis is a hoodlum town, run by a bunch of hoodlum families like the Fords.
In re the original story which prompted this thread at Slashdot, the whistle-blowing blogger is trying to "blow the whistle" on these hoodlums, and Godwin is responding by leveraging the courts to deny the blogger his 1st Amendment rights [both freedom of speech and freedom of the press].
If you were a real "liberal", then you'd be all over these violations of the 1st Amendment like, ah - may I say it? - white on rice.
PS: You also said I think you should be modded flamebait instead of interesting, which is exactly how leftists always respond to speech that they don't like it: Deny it, suppress it, extinguish it, eradicate it, and pretend that it never existed in the first place.
Not with tax money. The city council has a fiduciary duty to the people of Memphis to keep this asshole from wasting their money litigating over his hurt feelings.
I know this won't go down well with the libs at Slashdot, but Godwin is an African-American:
.
And, again, to infuriate the libs at Slashdot even further, if the sentences are grammatically correct and if the spelling is correct at the blogsite, then the blogger is almost certainly Caucasian.
So, in reality, this is probably a racial matter which is being disguised a privacy/right-to-know controversy.
And if you want to read about the disastrous state of racial affairs in the town of Memphis, then check out this lengthy expose from the Atlantic:
All right, I admit, it's been a while since I wrote any "C".
In the old days, the standard was that "p" was an array pointer if and only if "p == &p" [for malloc'ed, or malloc-able, pointers, in general, "p != &p"].
Having said that, I vaguely remember that for character arrays, in some implementations of compiled "C", you could count on an extra eight bits of 0's [i.e. "00000000"] immediately at the end of the array, and if you could move the array pointer over by one and read that "zero byte" [without throwing a segmentation fault in user mode], then you'd know that you had hit the end of the [character] array.
But I don't know of anything in the ANSI or IEEE standards which states that e.g. a 32-bit int array ends in 32-bits worth of 0's [since that actually is a valid 32-bit int, namely "0" itself], nor have I ever heard that e.g. the 64-bit value of all 0's was reserved in IEEE 754 to signify the end of an array of 64-bit doubles.
"Do you know how to find the midpoint of an array, without knowing the total # of elements"
Okay, I assume the language is C.
What does a raw "C" pointer give you?
If you're writing in kernel mode, the C-language [and its compiled implementations] won't even reliably throw a segmentation fault if you go past the end of the "malloc'ed" territory [otherwise strcpy() wouldn't be hax0rable to produce buffer overflows - although maybe the problem is that the kernel-ish aspects of strcpy() use an even more simplistic memory structure than what you get with malloc()].
If it were a file pointer, then you I guess you might be able to rely on EOF, but I don't know of any generalized "EOF" for malloc [at least not in old-school C - maybe one of the more recent ANSI standards has added something new that I don't know about].
And in this day and age, when even medium-sized businesses can be sitting on literally terabytes of data, how are you going to upload all of that data to "The Cloud" so that "The Cloud" can analyze it for you?
Maintaining a constant 10Mbps WAN connection to "The Cloud" would be monstrously expensive, and yet, at 10Mbps = (10 / 8)MBps = 1.25MBps, that means you would need
.
just to upload a terabyte of data at WAN speeds of 10Mbps.
So "The Cloud" isn't going to have realtime interactions with your corporate database - "The Cloud" is going to BE your corporate database.
In this day and age - when hardware is essentially worthless [today, for under $200, you can get what would have been a $10 million supercomputer ten years ago], and when even RDBs are essentially worthless [MySQL & PostgreSQL being free downloads], the only things which add value are:
.
Of those, at least 1), 3), and 4) are going to have to be uploaded to "The Cloud" [and 2) might have to at least interact with "The Cloud"], and unless "The Cloud" encrypts everything - both data & logic [and how do you really "encrypt" something if ultimately the registers in the CPU have to see unencrypted data, and especially unencrypted logic & algorithms?] - then you've just uploaded the crown jewels of your entire enterprise for all the world to see.
g.) give him all the information you have
In general I would agree with that advice - it's no fun [and certainly not productivity enhancing] to be in an environment where people are playing games and keeping secrets from one another.
The big exception I would make, however, is if you get even a whiff of the remotest possibility that your job might be under the magnifying glass as far as elimination is concerned.
If existing employee dude is in his late 40's, pulling down $150,000 a year, and if his healthcare costs are about to leap into the stratosphere as he enters his 50's, and if brand-spanking new employee dude is in his early 20's, and willing to work for a fraction of that [say $50,000], with almost no healthcare costs whatsoever, and if existing employee dude senses that there really isn't enough excess work lying around to justify the new hire, and if he suspects that the suits might be grooming brand-spanking new employee dude as his successor, then it might be time for existing employee dude to become a little less helpful to people, and a little more indispensable to them instead - if for no other reason than to buy a little time to figure out a game plan for what to do after his position is eliminated.
I can't open the thing in Windows Media Player, I can't open it in Real Player, and Digital Media Converter is telling me that I have to install Quacktime before it will convert the thing.
And I fscking refuse to install Quacktime.
FSCK THIS SHIZNAT.
AND FSCK THESE TAX-PAYER SUBSIDIZED, STEVE-JOBS'S-@$$-KISSING C*CKSUCKERS WHO ENCODE TO THIS PROPRIETARY SHIZNAT.
My recollection is that MSFT was dragging their feet on the introduction of a "mainstream" 64-bit Windows for literally years and that the AMD people were screaming bloody murder about it, and that "mainstream" Win64 only miraculously appeared at about exactly the same time that Intel was ready to release EM64T, so that, as a result, AMD completely lost their chance for a competitive advantage.
Now if my memory is faulty, then have at it - but I'm pretty sure that that's the way it went down [and no, I don't feel like Googling the dates - I seem to recall that there was a very buggy AMD64 Windows 2003 Server for a while, which got almost no traction in the marketplace, and then AMD64 Windows XP coincided more with the release of EM64T - whereas, by contrast, there had been an IA64 Windows XP for Itanium all the way back in 2001, which probably sold all of about 2 or 3 copies worldwide].
PS: Whether MSFT deliberately dragged their feet as a favor to Intel, or whether the AMD people bungled the corporate negotiations to get MSFT to port to AMD64, I know not, but I definitely remember that there was a good year or 18 months when all you could run on AMD64 was Linux or FreeBSD, and that was precisely the year or 18 months that AMD needed to seize control of the marketplace [which opportunity, as we have since seen, has been lost forever - or at least until the marketplace decides to switch from 64-bit to 128-bit address spaces, and someone else gets a chance to upstage Intel].
Moral of the story being that the greatest hardware in the world is utterly worthless without useable, productivity-enhancing software to run on it.
http://www.nasa.gov/mov/260503main_red_green_blue2.mov
http://www.nasa.gov/mov/260502main_nir_green_blue2.mov
Why can't these tax-payer subsidized f*ckt*ards take five or ten minutes out of their busy days to encode their cr*p in a non-proprietary format?
Like, say, this thing that's been around for more than a decade now - what's it called?
Help me out here...
"MPEG", is it?
Great minds think alike.
There is no inspiration in replacing "We don't know yet" with "God did it." Replacing one unknown (the universe's beginning) with another unknown (supernatural deity) is intellectual sloth.
Intellectual sloth is making the assumption that "God did it" and "We don't know [how] yet" are mutually incompatible propositions.
Or even the more simplistic assumption, "God exists", ergo "God did it", but that's probably too subtle a point to be introducing on Slashdot.
Anyway, my reason for posting my original remarks had nothing to do with questions of rigor, but rather with the frankly subhuman cruelty of burdening a young, fragile, innocent creature with such a manifestly horrible, nihilistic, suicidal outlook on life.
Within the next decade, expect this poor girl to show up in the local emergency room with slashed wrists.
And no, I'm not being facetious.
I've explained, in general terms, our family's non-religious views on the subject of creation and the Big Bang.
What a horribly desperate and hopeless outlook on life with which to burden a child.
And people wonder why kids these days are on Prozac?
Although the contrarian in me wonders if all these "Miracle of the Random-Completely-Unintelligent-and-Without-Any-Design-Whatsoever Creation Plus Bonus Ginzu Knives & We'll Also Throw in the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" movies might just light a certain spark in the poor girl - at least if they're as "inspirational" as some of the posters here seem to think.
The Non-Existent One is, after all, alleged to work in mysterious ways...
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theFont.style.fontFamily = "verdana";
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By combining block and file storage on one network, they say, you can cut costs by 50% and simplify IT administration.
What is "block" storage?
Good grief, people, this is Slashdot: The guy was working on INFORMATION THEORETIC approaches to quantum mechanics [and coming up with all sorts of bizarre contradictions therein] when he was in his 70's & 80's [i.e. at an age when most people are going senile].
Researchers Linda Smith and Chen Yu attempted to teach 28 children, 12 to 14 months old, six words by showing them two objects at a time on a computer monitor while two pre-recorded words were read to them. No information was given regarding which word went with which image.
Serious question: How do you get these babies to give informed consent to having their brains tossed around like salad?
Does this mean twice as many stories at Slashdot?