Itanium offers such a giant increase in performance (for some applications) compared to rival RISC products that you will see people investing time and money to take advantage of it. In addition, with Intel, SGI and HP all with product plans and thus the related volume and eco-system surrounding development tools, etc., I think the Itanium is positioned far better than Alpha to succeed.
Yeah... I sort of wonder about it too, although not in the political context.
I am interested whether the people who assert that all human beings have the same value also believe that there is no point in improving themselves. I mean, NASDAQ companies increase their perceived value by posting better results, acquiring new knowledge etc., why the (lots of) time invested into my own learning shouldn't be counted as my intrinsic worth?
Or maybe they are just being cynical and populist, catering to those that might consider themselves less valuable, and of course riding on the "would you please think of the children" bandwagon.
The *real* problem is, of course, finding objective criteria on objectiveness. Otherwise you could just set up an X-prize in finding objective criteria for education quality, and then use the results to set up a prize for education quality itself. Simple, no?
In fact, in GTA:SA with a set of cheats and quite a bit of skill, you can uncover several (I know of two) partially-furnished, somewhat-non-solid bordellos. R* left them in the game because, well, it wasn't worth to cut them. I think this points in the direction of Hot Coffee being a similar left-over.
There is also the problem of having too much realism. When everything is almost perfectly realistic, the brain concentrates on finding imperfections - inaccurate lighting, tiniest BSP flaws, misaligned textures. This happens because in the Real World those cues are used for determination of spatial relationships (surface quality, shape intricacies etc.) so when one of them is just slightly incorrect, you get this feeling of "wrongness".
So, actually, increasing simulation quality doesn't mean more subjective realism.
The important thing here is not to know everything about the whole Universe. It is enough to know everything about the Universe the ID proponents are aware of.
I suspect that making glass of the excellent flatness required for TFT LCDs is hard enough when the LCD is planar, much less curved. In addition, coating it later with an uniform layer of amorphous silicon, lithography etc depend on the surface being planar.
In fact, if you heat it above the Curie temperature for ferromagnetics, they are going to lose the domain arrangement and therefore the information while still being solid.
I am very sorry to have to enlighten you. As it happens, the "nutty" TIFF format you mentioned is actually the One Format to Rule Them All. You can have TIFF/JPEG (instead of JFIF, which is the real name for what you messily call JPEG), TIFF/LZW (instead of GIF), TIFF/CCITT (for two-color images), TIFF/RAW... You can pack pretty much any kind of compression into TIFF.
Heh, thought so... I work with FPGAs as a hobby. They are really great for certain tasks, but implementing big general-purpose processors in FPGAs is counter-productive for anything but research/prototyping/ASIC verification. If you are after performance, it is better to use an off-the-shelf CPU and attach a FPGA-based reconfigurable coprocessor.
Of course, if performance is secondary to simplicity or elegance or flexibility, embedding a cut-down CPU in an FPGA is *the* answer.
I was referring to the gung-ho comment about Virtex FPGAs in the story... I mean, I know on Slashdot we don't read articles, but THIS is going too far.
There are some questions. FPGAs aren't that big... a XC2V6000 that costs $4500 is about the right size for four cores of a simple 4-SIMD 24bit fixed-point signal processor - a UltraSPARC will not fit in it, unless it's seriously cut down.
Also speed of FPGAs is a huge let-down, unless a design takes advantage of their structure. There is no reason to believe that the processor will be designed for FPGAs... It is likely to be therefore very slow, even if you can implement it.
Minority Report type gloves can be easily done with markers on your fingers, two cameras and a little signal processing for Z extraction. No big deal here. It's not even hard to code that.
You do not understand the idea of a "subpoena". You can file a John Doe lawsuit against the unknown libeller and the subpoena Wikipedia and BellSouth to provide information required for this lawsuit.
I actually enjoy reading most of Otto Stern's rants. There are two possibilities:
1) The guy is genuine. Perverting the phrase: with enemies like this, who needs friends? 2) The guy is a joker. Most people that reply to his arts and don't get them make themselves look even funnier.
I strongy suspect 2) is true, as he published a few really sarcastic replies to his article on "geeks in suits" in the "positive responses" section.
Well, the story is submitted by Stern. This means enough - isn't he the same guy that advocated dressing in suits for geeks? I think he's really a half-joke alter-ego of somebody else:)
Creating a Lego car, plane, robot is creating a *new* type of a car, plane, robot, that by chance might even have some of the original functionality.
"Creating" a Star Wars Starfighter means really *modeling* the external shell of a specific project with custom-tailored bricks... How can this be called creative at all, eludes me.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, thanks! I'll try to follow that advice by sequencing them this way :)
Hm! The Spartan3 datasheet says I can power the rails up in any order. I would *really* welcome a comment on this! :)
Itanium offers such a giant increase in performance (for some applications) compared to rival RISC products that you will see people investing time and money to take advantage of it. In addition, with Intel, SGI and HP all with product plans and thus the related volume and eco-system surrounding development tools, etc., I think the Itanium is positioned far better than Alpha to succeed.
D'oh.
Yeah... I sort of wonder about it too, although not in the political context.
I am interested whether the people who assert that all human beings have the same value also believe that there is no point in improving themselves. I mean, NASDAQ companies increase their perceived value by posting better results, acquiring new knowledge etc., why the (lots of) time invested into my own learning shouldn't be counted as my intrinsic worth?
Or maybe they are just being cynical and populist, catering to those that might consider themselves less valuable, and of course riding on the "would you please think of the children" bandwagon.
The *real* problem is, of course, finding objective criteria on objectiveness. Otherwise you could just set up an X-prize in finding objective criteria for education quality, and then use the results to set up a prize for education quality itself. Simple, no?
In fact, in GTA:SA with a set of cheats and quite a bit of skill, you can uncover several (I know of two) partially-furnished, somewhat-non-solid bordellos. R* left them in the game because, well, it wasn't worth to cut them. I think this points in the direction of Hot Coffee being a similar left-over.
There is also the problem of having too much realism. When everything is almost perfectly realistic, the brain concentrates on finding imperfections - inaccurate lighting, tiniest BSP flaws, misaligned textures. This happens because in the Real World those cues are used for determination of spatial relationships (surface quality, shape intricacies etc.) so when one of them is just slightly incorrect, you get this feeling of "wrongness".
So, actually, increasing simulation quality doesn't mean more subjective realism.
The important thing here is not to know everything about the whole Universe. It is enough to know everything about the Universe the ID proponents are aware of.
What you say has been done, and has been already researched in Pixel Planes!
I suspect that making glass of the excellent flatness required for TFT LCDs is hard enough when the LCD is planar, much less curved. In addition, coating it later with an uniform layer of amorphous silicon, lithography etc depend on the surface being planar.
In fact, if you heat it above the Curie temperature for ferromagnetics, they are going to lose the domain arrangement and therefore the information while still being solid.
This is not *despite*. You can get better performance per watt with a 32-bit datapath than with a 64-bit one, isn't it obvious?
Dammit. Where's (+5, Troll) when you need it!
Seriously, my first reaction to Ruby was "Gak. Perl."
As far as analogies to document formats go, it's a pretty good one, isn't it?
I am very sorry to have to enlighten you. As it happens, the "nutty" TIFF format you mentioned is actually the One Format to Rule Them All. You can have TIFF/JPEG (instead of JFIF, which is the real name for what you messily call JPEG), TIFF/LZW (instead of GIF), TIFF/CCITT (for two-color images), TIFF/RAW... You can pack pretty much any kind of compression into TIFF.
Heh, thought so... I work with FPGAs as a hobby. They are really great for certain tasks, but implementing big general-purpose processors in FPGAs is counter-productive for anything but research/prototyping/ASIC verification. If you are after performance, it is better to use an off-the-shelf CPU and attach a FPGA-based reconfigurable coprocessor.
Of course, if performance is secondary to simplicity or elegance or flexibility, embedding a cut-down CPU in an FPGA is *the* answer.
I was referring to the gung-ho comment about Virtex FPGAs in the story... I mean, I know on Slashdot we don't read articles, but THIS is going too far.
:)
I decline responding to the rest of the comment
Forget the high clockspeed :)
There are some questions. FPGAs aren't that big... a XC2V6000 that costs $4500 is about the right size for four cores of a simple 4-SIMD 24bit fixed-point signal processor - a UltraSPARC will not fit in it, unless it's seriously cut down.
Also speed of FPGAs is a huge let-down, unless a design takes advantage of their structure. There is no reason to believe that the processor will be designed for FPGAs... It is likely to be therefore very slow, even if you can implement it.
Minority Report type gloves can be easily done with markers on your fingers, two cameras and a little signal processing for Z extraction. No big deal here. It's not even hard to code that.
Oh, rest assured, there is enough software in the cars to make a lot of it copyrighted ;) That said, it wouldn't fly anyway.
You do not understand the idea of a "subpoena". You can file a John Doe lawsuit against the unknown libeller and the subpoena Wikipedia and BellSouth to provide information required for this lawsuit.
I actually enjoy reading most of Otto Stern's rants. There are two possibilities:
1) The guy is genuine. Perverting the phrase: with enemies like this, who needs friends?
2) The guy is a joker. Most people that reply to his arts and don't get them make themselves look even funnier.
I strongy suspect 2) is true, as he published a few really sarcastic replies to his article on "geeks in suits" in the "positive responses" section.
Well, the story is submitted by Stern. This means enough - isn't he the same guy that advocated dressing in suits for geeks? I think he's really a half-joke alter-ego of somebody else :)
Trolla-trolla-la, and the ad money rolls in...
Creating a Lego car, plane, robot is creating a *new* type of a car, plane, robot, that by chance might even have some of the original functionality.
"Creating" a Star Wars Starfighter means really *modeling* the external shell of a specific project with custom-tailored bricks... How can this be called creative at all, eludes me.