If one IT company refuses to cooperate, it makes no difference. If most of the IT companies refuse to cooperate, the IT capability drops dramatically, and science, engineering, medicine and economy begin to suffer. That might just make a difference.
I can see how that would work as a PR exercise now. It's reminiscent of the breakdown between Sky and Virgin Media in the UK that left VM customers without Sky channels, which Sky were quick to capitalise on with advertisements. In that instance VM pushed back by sending out an apologetic newsletter to its subscribers, presenting Newscorp as disrespectful to its customers, putting corporate politics and income before its loyalty to its viewers. There's a risk that Google could do the same: witness its old "chilling effects" page that came up when rights issues forced it to remove search results.
I'm not sure that Fox News or the rest of Newscorp actually caries any information that the other western news networks omit. It's all homogeneous. The only distinction between Newscorp's output and everyone else's is that it's pre-digested into a commentary-heavy form of "news entertainment".
Poor advertising revenues online are rather orthogonal to the role of search engines in retrieving news. Search engines reduce the amount of time users spend digging through a site, potentially viewing ads, but that's part and parcel of how the web works and all sites have to deal with that. Google does have "stolen content" which can be viewed without even involving the original sites, but that's essentially headlines and single-sentence summaries. If that's the only news people feel like reading, journalists are fucked anyway.
Definitely, sending the same message repeatedly is better than sending multiple messages in different encoding schemes. However:
The Arecibo message was designed to be as easy as possible to decode, it would be possible to do so with just a pencil and paper.
Designed, sure. I recall reading that it was nigh-impenetrable in practice, and it flip-flops between ways of encoding the same data at various points (e.g. it introduces a scheme for writing binary in limited space in the first part, then ditches it in favour of just extending the space in the second) which is hardly conducive to understanding. It should've been edited, then retransmitted. That way it would still stand out, but it would give some clues as to what it's actually meant to say.
(Unless, of course, News Corp's sites represent such a significant amount of good news content that their loss makes Google's results poorer. I don't think that's the case.)
But truth is, it's a lot easier to find the news you're looking for from search engine. If you spot theres a news site you think is good quality, then you go to it. Now if the big news sites suddenly drop from Google but can be found via Bing, people are going to change there.
Current search engine users are almost exclusively Google users. If people almost exclusively get their news by searching, they have no site loyalty and almost exclusively get their news from whatever sites Google sends them, and therefore when the news sites drop off Google, they will stop visiting those sites. The people who visit the news sites directly or by syndication will not even notice the transition.
Only the subset of users who are loyal to a news site, and only reach it via Google searches, and who figure out why they can't find it on Google any more, will switch to Bing.
There are indeed tasks that don't parallelise well. My brain's filed them as unimportant, but that's likely due to the difficulty in doing computational work that parallelises poorly rather than some fundimental deficiency. A better way of putting it would be to say that most hard-core research computing is done in a manner that's very similar to hard-core gaming computing, so it's actually a very sensible transition.
"Based on human behavior" how? 1 in 10 of our responses to alien messages have been aggressive? 1 in 10 of humans would lead an interstellar invasion fleet according to polls? I'm curious.
On that subject, I just read a great paper on methane hydrates (trapping methane in ice) which would've have been possible without some truly enormous computing horsepower. Studies over a microsecond timescale (which is an eternity for molecules in motion) were needed because of the rarity of the events they were trying to model. Good luck: you're opening up a whole new generation of computational chemistry.
Okay, that's not quite true, most tasks benefit from piddling about on the CPU, but demanding tasks would be better off running on something faster and more specialised. The barrier to that is that it's harder to write GPGPU code.
Graphics processing, the technically demanding part of PC gaming, uses GPUs essentially exclusively. Physics processing, the runner-up, can already be loaded off to technically-similar PPUs, or even actual GPUs working as physics processors. The reason that most apps run on the CPU is that it's easier to write for, not that most apps actually run better on it for some fundimental reason.
GPUs are fast but limited to very specific kinds of instructions. If you can write your code using those instructions, it will run much quicker than it would on a general-purpose processor. They're also ahead of the curve on things like parallelisation, compared to desktop chips: the idea of writing graphics code for a 12-pipe GPU was mundane half a decade ago while there's still scant support for multiple cores in CPUs.
That's easy to say, but at the time New Orleans was founded, all that stuff pretty much did have to be there. Time passed, and it grew, and the desire for continuity meant that it stayed there. And now you've got a choice between abandoning the city to rot because it's in a dangerous location, or using some less-than-space-age engineering know-how to render it safe. The error here isn't that the latter was chosen, but that it was chosen and not properly followed through on.
Sparklines are specifically line graphs included totally in-line with text, without axes. Obviously line graphs as a whole have existed for much longer.
The most general claim of the patent, claim number 1, is:
associating a sparkline with a location in a document to provide a visual representation of one or more data values included in the document;associating with the sparkline a data source within the document including the one or more data values; associating the sparkline with one or more presentation options; generating the sparkline according to the one or more data values and the one or more associated presentation options by generating the selected visual representation based on the one or more data values with a matrix of points proportional to the associated location in the document; presenting the sparkline at the associated location in the document; and configuring the sparkline to be updated, such that: the sparkline is regenerated when one or more of the data values in the data source change; and the one or more presentation options are maintained when one or more document attributes are changed.
Actually, the W3C and IE appeared almost contemporeously with each other, so there wasn't much in the way of actual web (as opposed to network) standardisation at the time. In fact, the W3C was created to combat the existing standards-free mess. Microsoft's disregard for the growing standardisation of the web over the coming years was a serious issue, and a disincentive for other browsers to standardise, but it's not like they blundered into a divine and well-defined web and made a mess of it.
Nonsense. Standards bodies can codify existing practice as standards or for reference, but can equally define good practice by creating standards based on some specific, well-defined notions of what "good" is, which more often than not do not match existing practice.
Slashdot Mirror
If one IT company refuses to cooperate, it makes no difference. If most of the IT companies refuse to cooperate, the IT capability drops dramatically, and science, engineering, medicine and economy begin to suffer. That might just make a difference.
What's why you're posting on an x86 system. You're just so outraged at IBM.
I can see how that would work as a PR exercise now. It's reminiscent of the breakdown between Sky and Virgin Media in the UK that left VM customers without Sky channels, which Sky were quick to capitalise on with advertisements. In that instance VM pushed back by sending out an apologetic newsletter to its subscribers, presenting Newscorp as disrespectful to its customers, putting corporate politics and income before its loyalty to its viewers. There's a risk that Google could do the same: witness its old "chilling effects" page that came up when rights issues forced it to remove search results.
It's actually a reminder to himself for when he's naked. "Go Ogle."
I'm not sure that Fox News or the rest of Newscorp actually caries any information that the other western news networks omit. It's all homogeneous. The only distinction between Newscorp's output and everyone else's is that it's pre-digested into a commentary-heavy form of "news entertainment".
Poor advertising revenues online are rather orthogonal to the role of search engines in retrieving news. Search engines reduce the amount of time users spend digging through a site, potentially viewing ads, but that's part and parcel of how the web works and all sites have to deal with that. Google does have "stolen content" which can be viewed without even involving the original sites, but that's essentially headlines and single-sentence summaries. If that's the only news people feel like reading, journalists are fucked anyway.
Definitely, sending the same message repeatedly is better than sending multiple messages in different encoding schemes. However:
The Arecibo message was designed to be as easy as possible to decode, it would be possible to do so with just a pencil and paper.
Designed, sure. I recall reading that it was nigh-impenetrable in practice, and it flip-flops between ways of encoding the same data at various points (e.g. it introduces a scheme for writing binary in limited space in the first part, then ditches it in favour of just extending the space in the second) which is hardly conducive to understanding. It should've been edited, then retransmitted. That way it would still stand out, but it would give some clues as to what it's actually meant to say.
(Unless, of course, News Corp's sites represent such a significant amount of good news content that their loss makes Google's results poorer. I don't think that's the case.)
I think you've made an error here:
But truth is, it's a lot easier to find the news you're looking for from search engine. If you spot theres a news site you think is good quality, then you go to it. Now if the big news sites suddenly drop from Google but can be found via Bing, people are going to change there.
Current search engine users are almost exclusively Google users. If people almost exclusively get their news by searching, they have no site loyalty and almost exclusively get their news from whatever sites Google sends them, and therefore when the news sites drop off Google, they will stop visiting those sites. The people who visit the news sites directly or by syndication will not even notice the transition.
Only the subset of users who are loyal to a news site, and only reach it via Google searches, and who figure out why they can't find it on Google any more, will switch to Bing.
Don't even joke about that. What are the odds that they're going to be able to see an object as small as Pluto?
"I'm counting four rocky inner planets, four gas giants, and... well, shit, there's no ninth planet. Moving on..."
There are indeed tasks that don't parallelise well. My brain's filed them as unimportant, but that's likely due to the difficulty in doing computational work that parallelises poorly rather than some fundimental deficiency. A better way of putting it would be to say that most hard-core research computing is done in a manner that's very similar to hard-core gaming computing, so it's actually a very sensible transition.
"Based on human behavior" how? 1 in 10 of our responses to alien messages have been aggressive? 1 in 10 of humans would lead an interstellar invasion fleet according to polls? I'm curious.
On that subject, I just read a great paper on methane hydrates (trapping methane in ice) which would've have been possible without some truly enormous computing horsepower. Studies over a microsecond timescale (which is an eternity for molecules in motion) were needed because of the rarity of the events they were trying to model. Good luck: you're opening up a whole new generation of computational chemistry.
Okay, that's not quite true, most tasks benefit from piddling about on the CPU, but demanding tasks would be better off running on something faster and more specialised. The barrier to that is that it's harder to write GPGPU code.
Graphics processing, the technically demanding part of PC gaming, uses GPUs essentially exclusively. Physics processing, the runner-up, can already be loaded off to technically-similar PPUs, or even actual GPUs working as physics processors. The reason that most apps run on the CPU is that it's easier to write for, not that most apps actually run better on it for some fundimental reason.
The system is as fast as setups twice the size, i.e. it is half the size.
GPUs are fast but limited to very specific kinds of instructions. If you can write your code using those instructions, it will run much quicker than it would on a general-purpose processor. They're also ahead of the curve on things like parallelisation, compared to desktop chips: the idea of writing graphics code for a 12-pipe GPU was mundane half a decade ago while there's still scant support for multiple cores in CPUs.
That's easy to say, but at the time New Orleans was founded, all that stuff pretty much did have to be there. Time passed, and it grew, and the desire for continuity meant that it stayed there. And now you've got a choice between abandoning the city to rot because it's in a dangerous location, or using some less-than-space-age engineering know-how to render it safe. The error here isn't that the latter was chosen, but that it was chosen and not properly followed through on.
Sparklines are specifically line graphs included totally in-line with text, without axes. Obviously line graphs as a whole have existed for much longer.
The most general claim of the patent, claim number 1, is:
We're two for two, then.
The bit where my brain parsed it as "successful as an image" rather than "successful at what he was attempting to do". *facepalm*
Guy Fawkes? The man burned in effigy to underline his failure to accomplish his goals? I can think of better symbols!
Actually, the W3C and IE appeared almost contemporeously with each other, so there wasn't much in the way of actual web (as opposed to network) standardisation at the time. In fact, the W3C was created to combat the existing standards-free mess. Microsoft's disregard for the growing standardisation of the web over the coming years was a serious issue, and a disincentive for other browsers to standardise, but it's not like they blundered into a divine and well-defined web and made a mess of it.
Nonsense. Standards bodies can codify existing practice as standards or for reference, but can equally define good practice by creating standards based on some specific, well-defined notions of what "good" is, which more often than not do not match existing practice.