Notice that this is an exact copy of this other comment here which was posted 8 minutes before this one. I don't know if this is a case of plaguerism on one person's part, two people's part, or no people's part, but it sure is fishy.
If I had mod points, I'd mod this guy up. He's a little inflammatory, but underneath it is a nut of truth - that the people complaining are basically those that have tons of time and nothing to do with it, and those using the service have money because they work their asses off. I can basically only play WoW on weekends. I am level 23 and happy with my progress - I don't play every weekend and I don't play all weekend. WoW has some built in properties to limit farming anyway - the best equipment comes from instances and there are as many instances as there are players.
You are missing a key relationship: the longer a half life is, the less radioactive the substance is. So while plutonium will stick around for a long time, its radioactivity is relatively low in comparison to some of the other nuclear wastes. In addition, the plutonium can be reprocessed and broken down again and again. But the most important thing is that the radioactivity is well understood, and can therefore be diluted and safely stored in a specially designed facility. Of course we don't have such a facility right now, but that's a completely different issue.
From wikipedia: The primary advantage of pebble bed reactors is that they can be designed to be inherently safe. As they get hotter, the rate of neutron capture by U-238 increases, reducing the number of neutrons available to cause fission. This places a natural limit on the power produced by the reactor. The reactor vessel is designed so that without mechanical aids it loses more heat than the reactor can generate in this idle state. The design adapts well to safety features. In particular, most of the fuel containment resides in the pebbles, and the pebbles are designed so that a containment failure releases at most a 0.5 mm sphere of radioactive material.
Now compare that sphere of radioactive material in an accident to what is released by coal power plants every day and you'll see why many people would rather have pebble bed reactors than coal fired ones.
The difference between the operating system market and the graphics card market is huge. Microsoft is a monopoly, so they can price wherever they want and most people would have to go along with them. The graphics card market is in serious competition - if ATI raised the prices of their cards by 50 bucks, they'd lose a ton of business. It is a classic two product market competition - since ATI's and nvidia's offerings are basically identical, they have no choice but to pick the lowest price they can manage, because otherwise their competitor would put them out of business!
And as for the graphics card market not allowing new entrys, I seem to remember a time when no one had heard of nvidia and 3dfx was the king of the hill. Look what happened there! And I would expect someone like intel or amd to branch out into graphics cards in the current environment of stagnation in processors. Multiple core cpus aren't all that different than graphics cards, in the end.
3. Price. After 1,2. How do they keep the price affordable? Especailly with dedicated gaming units like the PS2 and Xbox... how do you keep PC gaming and encourage people to shell out cash. It seems more and more common for a game to be PS2 only, or Xbox only.... and no PC version. This removes the motivation to spend big bucks on GPU's.
Since they are already supplying the graphics chips to Xbox and possibly PS/2 (I'm not fully familiar with the hardware, as I own neither), I'd say they have the price problem beat. What do they care if everyone plays games on the XBox instead of the PC? Either one is nvidia hardware. And if I recall correctly, Longhorn is going to require a graphics card. I'd say the future is pretty bright for ATI and nvidia.
Usually in fields such as electrical engineering, students are encouraged to go out and get 2-5 years work experience before returning to school for a masters or phd. Your work experience is not a liability at all - it is an asset to understand how things are really done in the world. You also know what work is really like, so the courseload at a regular university should be bearable. Personally, I think that disciplines that do not encourage people to spend a few years in the work environment before getting post graduate degrees are going to produce a lot of pie in the sky thinkers who can't cut it in real life.
Re:Another good book and thoughts
on
100 Years of Einstein
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It should be noted that einstein won the nobel prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, which is a part of quantum mechanics.
he isn't using black and scholes. he's using the binomial method of valuation, which DOES require an expected rate of return. And black scholes does require the risk free interest rate, which can be considered an expected return.
NASA spent untold dollars inventing a pen that would work in zero-G. The Russian's used a pencil.
Actually, I'll tell you how many dollars nasa spent developing a pen that worked in zero g. They spent 0. Not a cent. Someone developed it on their own for scuba diving, and then they bought tons of them from him because pencils (which they were using) have all sorts of problems in zero g - for instance, graphite and wood shavings could get in circutry, both are flammable, etc.
The distribution of stock prices is not continuous. They are generally quoted in cents, so you can't trade for less than a cent. This is important when you have an option that is far out of the money (nowhere near the underlying price, and intrinsic value zero).
Not to mention that you neglected the expected return of the stock, but that's ok for this crowd.
I assume you mean it would be ironic if Nvidia was killed because they didn't incorporate multicore GPU's... or that nvidia was killed because they did incorporate multicore. Either way it isn't irony unless your last name is morisette - here is a definition of irony:
Irony involves the perception that things are not what they are said to be or what they seem. That's from our sacred cow, wikipedia.
What you're looking for is poetic justice, which is defined as: Poetic justice refers to a person receiving punishment intimately related to their crime. For example, "poetic justice" for a rapist would be becoming the rape victim; for a adulteress, having her spouse be an adulterer; and so on.
That's a tesla coil, completely different than what I'm talking about. However, you do have several in your house. Any CRT's use them, if my memory serves correctly. Not particularly dangerous. The most dangerous electric appliance in your house is probably the toaster or hair dryer.
This is rated funny, but Nikola Tesla was working on something like this for much of his life. The Wyadcliffe (sp?) tower is just the biggest example. Go check it out on wikipedia like you do for everything else.
You don't understand how the story could possibly make the frontpage. To those that know how slashdot really works, it was inevitable that once this story was written, it would reach the front page.
Oil is also nowhere near running out. What is running out is the easiest oil to pump and refine. Shale oil is all over the place, and can be refined to gasoline, but it is much more expensive. Rest assured, your plastic coke bottles will never run out, not in your lifetime, not in your grandchildren's lifetime, not in their grandchildren's lifetime.
When something is moving very very fast, it looks like it is moving perfectly straight. I imagine if the picture were bigger or had larger resolution, you would be able to see the streak being influenced by gravity.
I KNOW! I can't live without my slashdot so I just kept hitting ctrl-r again and again until finally after 10 minutes of doing it continuously, I got a front page served up! Repeat the process for reading an actual story and for posting this response! 30 solid minutes where I could be abusing myself flushed right down the toilet!
Re:Print your own hologram (after calculating it)
on
The Future of Holograms
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Anyone know of a really hi-res output device?
How about a dvd burner? That has some pretty damn good resolution.
This is a perfect example of the power of press in action. This is how reporting is supposed to happen in the united states - find something wrong, and talk about it and raise such a furor over it that things get better. And since EA employs programmers and many slashdot readers are programmers, we should all keep ourselves informed.
This is all horrible yes. But there is one thing wrong with your reasoning:
The Indian government accepted responsiblility for the land when Dow + UC gave them 400 mil for the damages. Yes that's right, almost half a billion dollars. And this was years and years ago. It hasn't been cleaned up because of many false applications for damages (original estimates were 100k people should recieve compensation, 500k applied), and the courts have tied up any cleanup efforts. Can you blame UC and Dow for people who are hurt after they sold the property and the Indian governement has done nothing to improve conditions there? I hate how everyone is up in arms about this whole thing when they don't realize what the current situation is!
I dunno if gid will post this, but he made a networked media player for linux using php and icecast - find it here. Fantastic peice of work. Any number of people can add or remove files from the current playlist, you can save the playlist, and you can veto the current song. I think you can hack it to broadcast video as well. Go check it out!
Slashdot Mirror
It is a word for word copy. Yours was later. Either you posted both, or at least one of you is a plagiarist.
Notice that this is an exact copy of this other comment here which was posted 8 minutes before this one. I don't know if this is a case of plaguerism on one person's part, two people's part, or no people's part, but it sure is fishy.
If I had mod points, I'd mod this guy up. He's a little inflammatory, but underneath it is a nut of truth - that the people complaining are basically those that have tons of time and nothing to do with it, and those using the service have money because they work their asses off. I can basically only play WoW on weekends. I am level 23 and happy with my progress - I don't play every weekend and I don't play all weekend. WoW has some built in properties to limit farming anyway - the best equipment comes from instances and there are as many instances as there are players.
You are missing a key relationship: the longer a half life is, the less radioactive the substance is. So while plutonium will stick around for a long time, its radioactivity is relatively low in comparison to some of the other nuclear wastes. In addition, the plutonium can be reprocessed and broken down again and again. But the most important thing is that the radioactivity is well understood, and can therefore be diluted and safely stored in a specially designed facility. Of course we don't have such a facility right now, but that's a completely different issue.
I cannot believe that you rolled firefox without testing it with your own internal helpdesk software.
From wikipedia: The primary advantage of pebble bed reactors is that they can be designed to be inherently safe. As they get hotter, the rate of neutron capture by U-238 increases, reducing the number of neutrons available to cause fission. This places a natural limit on the power produced by the reactor. The reactor vessel is designed so that without mechanical aids it loses more heat than the reactor can generate in this idle state. The design adapts well to safety features. In particular, most of the fuel containment resides in the pebbles, and the pebbles are designed so that a containment failure releases at most a 0.5 mm sphere of radioactive material.
Now compare that sphere of radioactive material in an accident to what is released by coal power plants every day and you'll see why many people would rather have pebble bed reactors than coal fired ones.
The difference between the operating system market and the graphics card market is huge. Microsoft is a monopoly, so they can price wherever they want and most people would have to go along with them. The graphics card market is in serious competition - if ATI raised the prices of their cards by 50 bucks, they'd lose a ton of business. It is a classic two product market competition - since ATI's and nvidia's offerings are basically identical, they have no choice but to pick the lowest price they can manage, because otherwise their competitor would put them out of business!
And as for the graphics card market not allowing new entrys, I seem to remember a time when no one had heard of nvidia and 3dfx was the king of the hill. Look what happened there! And I would expect someone like intel or amd to branch out into graphics cards in the current environment of stagnation in processors. Multiple core cpus aren't all that different than graphics cards, in the end.
3. Price. After 1,2. How do they keep the price affordable? Especailly with dedicated gaming units like the PS2 and Xbox... how do you keep PC gaming and encourage people to shell out cash. It seems more and more common for a game to be PS2 only, or Xbox only.... and no PC version. This removes the motivation to spend big bucks on GPU's.
Since they are already supplying the graphics chips to Xbox and possibly PS/2 (I'm not fully familiar with the hardware, as I own neither), I'd say they have the price problem beat. What do they care if everyone plays games on the XBox instead of the PC? Either one is nvidia hardware. And if I recall correctly, Longhorn is going to require a graphics card. I'd say the future is pretty bright for ATI and nvidia.
Usually in fields such as electrical engineering, students are encouraged to go out and get 2-5 years work experience before returning to school for a masters or phd. Your work experience is not a liability at all - it is an asset to understand how things are really done in the world. You also know what work is really like, so the courseload at a regular university should be bearable. Personally, I think that disciplines that do not encourage people to spend a few years in the work environment before getting post graduate degrees are going to produce a lot of pie in the sky thinkers who can't cut it in real life.
It should be noted that einstein won the nobel prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, which is a part of quantum mechanics.
he isn't using black and scholes. he's using the binomial method of valuation, which DOES require an expected rate of return. And black scholes does require the risk free interest rate, which can be considered an expected return.
NASA spent untold dollars inventing a pen that would work in zero-G. The Russian's used a pencil.
Actually, I'll tell you how many dollars nasa spent developing a pen that worked in zero g. They spent 0. Not a cent. Someone developed it on their own for scuba diving, and then they bought tons of them from him because pencils (which they were using) have all sorts of problems in zero g - for instance, graphite and wood shavings could get in circutry, both are flammable, etc.
The distribution of stock prices is not continuous. They are generally quoted in cents, so you can't trade for less than a cent. This is important when you have an option that is far out of the money (nowhere near the underlying price, and intrinsic value zero).
Not to mention that you neglected the expected return of the stock, but that's ok for this crowd.
I assume you mean it would be ironic if Nvidia was killed because they didn't incorporate multicore GPU's... or that nvidia was killed because they did incorporate multicore. Either way it isn't irony unless your last name is morisette - here is a definition of irony:
Irony involves the perception that things are not what they are said to be or what they seem.
That's from our sacred cow, wikipedia.
What you're looking for is poetic justice, which is defined as:
Poetic justice refers to a person receiving punishment intimately related to their crime. For example, "poetic justice" for a rapist would be becoming the rape victim; for a adulteress, having her spouse be an adulterer; and so on.
That's a tesla coil, completely different than what I'm talking about. However, you do have several in your house. Any CRT's use them, if my memory serves correctly. Not particularly dangerous. The most dangerous electric appliance in your house is probably the toaster or hair dryer.
This is rated funny, but Nikola Tesla was working on something like this for much of his life. The Wyadcliffe (sp?) tower is just the biggest example. Go check it out on wikipedia like you do for everything else.
With apologies to Douglas Adams:
You don't understand how the story could possibly make the frontpage. To those that know how slashdot really works, it was inevitable that once this story was written, it would reach the front page.
oh man I messed that up bad.
Oil is also nowhere near running out. What is running out is the easiest oil to pump and refine. Shale oil is all over the place, and can be refined to gasoline, but it is much more expensive. Rest assured, your plastic coke bottles will never run out, not in your lifetime, not in your grandchildren's lifetime, not in their grandchildren's lifetime.
When something is moving very very fast, it looks like it is moving perfectly straight. I imagine if the picture were bigger or had larger resolution, you would be able to see the streak being influenced by gravity.
I keep getting 503 errors.
I KNOW! I can't live without my slashdot so I just kept hitting ctrl-r again and again until finally after 10 minutes of doing it continuously, I got a front page served up! Repeat the process for reading an actual story and for posting this response! 30 solid minutes where I could be abusing myself flushed right down the toilet!
Anyone know of a really hi-res output device?
How about a dvd burner? That has some pretty damn good resolution.
This is a perfect example of the power of press in action. This is how reporting is supposed to happen in the united states - find something wrong, and talk about it and raise such a furor over it that things get better. And since EA employs programmers and many slashdot readers are programmers, we should all keep ourselves informed.
This is all horrible yes. But there is one thing wrong with your reasoning:
The Indian government accepted responsiblility for the land when Dow + UC gave them 400 mil for the damages. Yes that's right, almost half a billion dollars. And this was years and years ago. It hasn't been cleaned up because of many false applications for damages (original estimates were 100k people should recieve compensation, 500k applied), and the courts have tied up any cleanup efforts. Can you blame UC and Dow for people who are hurt after they sold the property and the Indian governement has done nothing to improve conditions there? I hate how everyone is up in arms about this whole thing when they don't realize what the current situation is!
I dunno if gid will post this, but he made a networked media player for linux using php and icecast - find it here. Fantastic peice of work. Any number of people can add or remove files from the current playlist, you can save the playlist, and you can veto the current song. I think you can hack it to broadcast video as well. Go check it out!
lol you actually put it in your sig! That's classic.