Click on that link, press Ctrl+F, then type in "paperback". The NYT not only has best-seller lists for paperback books, it actually has multiple lists for different types of paperbacks. Your point kind of vanishes from there. If TFA specifically says 9.99 for hardcover books, then I missed it and I apologize. But I didn't see that distinction made in TFA. And I still think the life-time of the e-book will be an issue. I usually read a book once when I buy it, and if I like it, I may read it again 5-10 years later.
Actually, it's "almost" understandable for advanced college textbooks. The target audience is so small in some cases that it's barely worth writing the book. Also, in college almost everyone buys a used book if they can, and then sells it back at the end of the semester, making it even less worthwhile to write/print the book. I'm not saying they're not overcharging at all, but I doubt they're making a killing off them (although I could be wrong;-).
Why are companies so greedy? When I buy a book, I go to a store and buy it in paperback, which is cheaper than $9.99. So this company wants to sell me a book without the paper (which saves them a lot of money on production and distribution costs), and yet they still want to charge me even more? An e-book is worth less than a paperback to me, it costs them a hell of a lot less to make and distribute copies, and I'm certain it will be bound up in DRM so tightly that you can't use it with different devices, which means you will have to buy it again when that device goes out of style. Does that sound like a good deal to anyone here?
... the article about the super-carrier battling a hurricane, and you have one of the Navy's new top-secret weapons programs. Within the next 10 years, everyone may start wondering why every Atlantic hurricane stomps all over Cuba before turning north-east away from the US.;-)
This is a joke of course, but the really crazy thing about it is that Congress probably would approve spending for something stupid like this. They've approved things a lot farther fetched than this in the past. Actually, it would be cool if we could steer one over Atlanta to alleviate the drought condition (it's never full hurricane strength by the time it gets that far inland, but it still drops a lot of rain).
Don't be an ass. You've said nothing to indicate that you even know a fraction of what I know, which makes it seem like you're just bashing randomly. If you want to say something more specific to prove you know what you're talking about, no one is stopping you.
The last score I received on an IQ test was 150. I will admit that I only have a BS (Bachelor's of Science) degree from a good technical school (Georgia Tech). I don't have a Masters degree or a PhD, but I do have a great deal of respect for science.
However, I am referring to a real article written by a real astrophysicist. If you want to yell at someone, yell at him. He explained at length how that entire branch of science was practically a pipe dream. He explained how scientists are building potentially flawed theories on top of other potentially flawed theories based on the tiniest sliver of information (which they can't even be sure is accurate). It requires a lot of intelligence and creativity in addition to a firm understanding of modern physics to even make plausible educated guesses, but they're still just guesses, and any breakthrough discoveries in physics can bring the whole thing crashing down.
Thanks for the tip, but I'm already doing that.;-) The first two-thirds of my drive are dedicated to Windows XP and the last third is free for installing whatever I feel like playing with (BSD, Ubuntu, RedHat). The only time I've ever had a problem with a dual-boot install was with PC-BSD. FreeBSD worked fine, but PC-BSD blew away my C partition (fortunately I keep all my important stuff on D).
If Gutsy has newer rt2500 drivers than Feisty, maybe I'll give it a try.
...but is the Ralink rt2500(PCI) driver in this version working? It really sucked to go from Ubuntu 6.x where it sort of worked (it was a real pain to set up WPA, and the connection died every hour), to Ubuntu 7.04 where it didn't work at all. I don't want to bother downloading Gutsy if it's not going to work.
(Please don't tell me "it works if you use ndiswrapper or download XYZ after you install Linux" because I can't download ANYTHING without a working network driver. My home PC is nowhere near where the Internet cable comes into my house, and I'm not going to drag it across the house and back so I can spend a few hours setting it up just to see if it works as poorly as it did in 6.x.)
Astrophysicists just make stuff up. They have no way to test any theories, no way to watch anything unfold on a cosmic scale, and no way of knowing what may have mangled the light their telescopes see by the time it reaches us. I read a great article on it once written by an astrophysicist who basically said it was the most fun branch of science because you could just make wild and crazy stuff up.
As long as you can cram your square peg theory into the round hole we see through our telescopes, it becomes accepted as a plausible theory. Dark matter, anyone?
Actually, neither nVidia nor the editor chose DirectX.
Each chapter is contributed by a different author, and each author decides which API to use. I wrote one of the chapters of GPU Gems 2 (see http://sponeil.net/), and my chapter/demo used OpenGL. When I asked the guys at nVidia if they had a preference, they didn't care. They didn't even care whether I used nVidia's Cg or the standard GLSL. (I started with GLSL but switched to Cg because the GLSL compiler didn't optimize it well enough.)
...before it reaches the level of spam I get in the mailbox in front of my house. I swear, if we want to save the trees, we need to start by arresting the people putting all those unwanted 20-100 page sales catalogs in everyone's mailbox every day.
It's always been legal to lie in campaign ads anywhere in the US. The lie comes out on TV, on the front page of all the newspapers, and so on. The retraction comes out with an apology on some obscure page of the newspaper that a total of 5 people read. A surprising number of elections have been won (or lost) using tactics like that.
For all the software I've published under the BSD license, I need to change the license to say "You can't use any of this code in a GPL project". Too bad earlier versions weren't protected by that clause, but I don't suppose there's much I can do about that.
It burns me up to think that someone can take code I want to share with everyone, fix a few bugs in it, perhaps add a few minor features to it, label his additions as GPL, and then try to sue me when I get around to fixing those same bugs or adding the same features in my code. Don't even bother trying to tell me no one can try to sue me for that. You can "try" to sue anyone for anything in this country. Even if I win, it will still cost me a lot of time and money I don't have.
The point is that if I'm nice enough to share my code with everyone, I shouldn't have to worry about being sued by some asshat who's stingier about sharing than I am. (Disclaimer: I used the word "asshat" because of the frivolous lawsuit, not because he likes GPL.)
I think the problem is that it's difficult to tell which way is uphill until some of the modifications die off (which may not be immediate). Like software genetic algorithms, I think random mutations are nature's answer. Most random mutations knock organisms back down the hill, but every now and then they create a sub-species that starts climbing a different hill.
"Also: if the new germs are really more well-adapted (ic better at multiplying and spreading), wouldn't they have evolved like that on earth? Especially since the evolutionary step is apparently small enough to be attained by a limited colony in a very limited time?"
Not necessarily. Evolution is like a simple hill-climbing algorithm in computer programming. It blindly heads in any upward direction without any way of knowing if it will get stuck at the top of a small hill when there is a much bigger hill right next to it. It is unnatural for it to go back downhill (to weaken itself) on purpose to look for bigger hills to climb. But changes to the environment distort the landscape, in some cases turning hills into valleys and forcing life to climb back up or die out.
So most likely the germs had their little hill turned upside down in micro-gravity and were forced to climb up to the top of a new one. Their landscape got turned upside down again when they came back down to Earth, and they ended up finding a bigger hill than the one they started on.
I agree with you, and 9 was definitely the bottom of the barrel. Books 10 and 11 were a good deal better, though. Things would have to be moving really fast in 12 to wrap everything up.
I don't buy those arguments. Direct I/O to numbered sectors has its own mess of problems, and that argument doesn't take into account that disk access is still orders of magnitude slower than system memory access, or the fact that disk access is limited to sectors. This memory won't have those limitations (and I never implied that faster CPU memory caches would go away).
Security will definitely still be a critical issue, but how does removing unnecessary code make it less simple or reliable? Let's say you're a SQL Server developer writing a B-tree algorithm for a database index. Instead of creating your own load/save functions, and instead of creating your own memory caching functions for dealing with which blocks should be kept in memory, you could simply write a version of malloc/free that takes a file pointer (and keep the address of the root node at the front of the file). It would be faster, simpler, more reliable, and use a lot less memory. The developer would still need transactional code for commit/rollback/recover, but a good chunk of code could (and all the bugs that come with it) could still be eliminated.
Either read TFA or pay closer attention. TFA says this could potentially replace both system RAM and solid-state (i.e. flash) drives, essentially replacing the two separate pieces of hardware with one. This wouldn't just make laptops faster and batteries last longer, it would be a paradigm-shifting change. The system memory IS the hard drive, and vice versa.
All of a sudden, all that buffering code written for dealing with files does nothing but slow the system down. Just treat the file pointer like a normal memory pointer.
I was talking about tighter integration than that. If you dedicate most of the memory to a ram disk, you won't be able to use 100GB of memory when you need it.
And don't tell me that no one needs 100GB of memory. I'm a developer, and I play around with personal programs that would love to have 100GB of memory to play with from time to time (usually math-heavy algorithms).;-)
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/bestseller/index.html
Click on that link, press Ctrl+F, then type in "paperback". The NYT not only has best-seller lists for paperback books, it actually has multiple lists for different types of paperbacks. Your point kind of vanishes from there. If TFA specifically says 9.99 for hardcover books, then I missed it and I apologize. But I didn't see that distinction made in TFA. And I still think the life-time of the e-book will be an issue. I usually read a book once when I buy it, and if I like it, I may read it again 5-10 years later.
Actually, it's "almost" understandable for advanced college textbooks. The target audience is so small in some cases that it's barely worth writing the book. Also, in college almost everyone buys a used book if they can, and then sells it back at the end of the semester, making it even less worthwhile to write/print the book. I'm not saying they're not overcharging at all, but I doubt they're making a killing off them (although I could be wrong ;-).
Why are companies so greedy? When I buy a book, I go to a store and buy it in paperback, which is cheaper than $9.99. So this company wants to sell me a book without the paper (which saves them a lot of money on production and distribution costs), and yet they still want to charge me even more? An e-book is worth less than a paperback to me, it costs them a hell of a lot less to make and distribute copies, and I'm certain it will be bound up in DRM so tightly that you can't use it with different devices, which means you will have to buy it again when that device goes out of style. Does that sound like a good deal to anyone here?
It gets a +5 funny all by itself.
... the article about the super-carrier battling a hurricane, and you have one of the Navy's new top-secret weapons programs. Within the next 10 years, everyone may start wondering why every Atlantic hurricane stomps all over Cuba before turning north-east away from the US. ;-)
This is a joke of course, but the really crazy thing about it is that Congress probably would approve spending for something stupid like this. They've approved things a lot farther fetched than this in the past. Actually, it would be cool if we could steer one over Atlanta to alleviate the drought condition (it's never full hurricane strength by the time it gets that far inland, but it still drops a lot of rain).
Are you trying to say there may actually be a good side to the WGA stuff Microsoft is forcing everyone to install? ;-)
Definitely. Just wondering whether it was worth the trouble to download and burn it. ;-)
Don't be an ass. You've said nothing to indicate that you even know a fraction of what I know, which makes it seem like you're just bashing randomly. If you want to say something more specific to prove you know what you're talking about, no one is stopping you.
The last score I received on an IQ test was 150. I will admit that I only have a BS (Bachelor's of Science) degree from a good technical school (Georgia Tech). I don't have a Masters degree or a PhD, but I do have a great deal of respect for science.
However, I am referring to a real article written by a real astrophysicist. If you want to yell at someone, yell at him. He explained at length how that entire branch of science was practically a pipe dream. He explained how scientists are building potentially flawed theories on top of other potentially flawed theories based on the tiniest sliver of information (which they can't even be sure is accurate). It requires a lot of intelligence and creativity in addition to a firm understanding of modern physics to even make plausible educated guesses, but they're still just guesses, and any breakthrough discoveries in physics can bring the whole thing crashing down.
Thanks for the tip, but I'm already doing that. ;-) The first two-thirds of my drive are dedicated to Windows XP and the last third is free for installing whatever I feel like playing with (BSD, Ubuntu, RedHat). The only time I've ever had a problem with a dual-boot install was with PC-BSD. FreeBSD worked fine, but PC-BSD blew away my C partition (fortunately I keep all my important stuff on D).
If Gutsy has newer rt2500 drivers than Feisty, maybe I'll give it a try.
...but is the Ralink rt2500(PCI) driver in this version working? It really sucked to go from Ubuntu 6.x where it sort of worked (it was a real pain to set up WPA, and the connection died every hour), to Ubuntu 7.04 where it didn't work at all. I don't want to bother downloading Gutsy if it's not going to work.
(Please don't tell me "it works if you use ndiswrapper or download XYZ after you install Linux" because I can't download ANYTHING without a working network driver. My home PC is nowhere near where the Internet cable comes into my house, and I'm not going to drag it across the house and back so I can spend a few hours setting it up just to see if it works as poorly as it did in 6.x.)
Astrophysicists just make stuff up. They have no way to test any theories, no way to watch anything unfold on a cosmic scale, and no way of knowing what may have mangled the light their telescopes see by the time it reaches us. I read a great article on it once written by an astrophysicist who basically said it was the most fun branch of science because you could just make wild and crazy stuff up.
As long as you can cram your square peg theory into the round hole we see through our telescopes, it becomes accepted as a plausible theory. Dark matter, anyone?
It's an old and tired joke, but because it promises to "bring damaged limbs and organs back to life", it's the best post I've seen to use it with:
I, for one, welcome our new reanimated zombie overlords.
Actually, neither nVidia nor the editor chose DirectX.
/demo used OpenGL. When I asked the guys at nVidia if they had a preference, they didn't care. They didn't even care whether I used nVidia's Cg or the standard GLSL. (I started with GLSL but switched to Cg because the GLSL compiler didn't optimize it well enough.)
Each chapter is contributed by a different author, and each author decides which API to use. I wrote one of the chapters of GPU Gems 2 (see http://sponeil.net/), and my chapter
Limiting vocabulary to real words that are spelled correctly "impeads" you even more. ;-)
...before it reaches the level of spam I get in the mailbox in front of my house. I swear, if we want to save the trees, we need to start by arresting the people putting all those unwanted 20-100 page sales catalogs in everyone's mailbox every day.
It's always been legal to lie in campaign ads anywhere in the US. The lie comes out on TV, on the front page of all the newspapers, and so on. The retraction comes out with an apology on some obscure page of the newspaper that a total of 5 people read. A surprising number of elections have been won (or lost) using tactics like that.
I'm sure the richest people, who can afford to buy a million sim cards, will agree to that.
For all the software I've published under the BSD license, I need to change the license to say "You can't use any of this code in a GPL project". Too bad earlier versions weren't protected by that clause, but I don't suppose there's much I can do about that.
It burns me up to think that someone can take code I want to share with everyone, fix a few bugs in it, perhaps add a few minor features to it, label his additions as GPL, and then try to sue me when I get around to fixing those same bugs or adding the same features in my code. Don't even bother trying to tell me no one can try to sue me for that. You can "try" to sue anyone for anything in this country. Even if I win, it will still cost me a lot of time and money I don't have.
The point is that if I'm nice enough to share my code with everyone, I shouldn't have to worry about being sued by some asshat who's stingier about sharing than I am. (Disclaimer: I used the word "asshat" because of the frivolous lawsuit, not because he likes GPL.)
I think the problem is that it's difficult to tell which way is uphill until some of the modifications die off (which may not be immediate). Like software genetic algorithms, I think random mutations are nature's answer. Most random mutations knock organisms back down the hill, but every now and then they create a sub-species that starts climbing a different hill.
"Also: if the new germs are really more well-adapted (ic better at multiplying and spreading), wouldn't they have evolved like that on earth? Especially since the evolutionary step is apparently small enough to be attained by a limited colony in a very limited time?"
Not necessarily. Evolution is like a simple hill-climbing algorithm in computer programming. It blindly heads in any upward direction without any way of knowing if it will get stuck at the top of a small hill when there is a much bigger hill right next to it. It is unnatural for it to go back downhill (to weaken itself) on purpose to look for bigger hills to climb. But changes to the environment distort the landscape, in some cases turning hills into valleys and forcing life to climb back up or die out.
So most likely the germs had their little hill turned upside down in micro-gravity and were forced to climb up to the top of a new one. Their landscape got turned upside down again when they came back down to Earth, and they ended up finding a bigger hill than the one they started on.
I agree with you, and 9 was definitely the bottom of the barrel. Books 10 and 11 were a good deal better, though. Things would have to be moving really fast in 12 to wrap everything up.
I don't buy those arguments. Direct I/O to numbered sectors has its own mess of problems, and that argument doesn't take into account that disk access is still orders of magnitude slower than system memory access, or the fact that disk access is limited to sectors. This memory won't have those limitations (and I never implied that faster CPU memory caches would go away).
Security will definitely still be a critical issue, but how does removing unnecessary code make it less simple or reliable? Let's say you're a SQL Server developer writing a B-tree algorithm for a database index. Instead of creating your own load/save functions, and instead of creating your own memory caching functions for dealing with which blocks should be kept in memory, you could simply write a version of malloc/free that takes a file pointer (and keep the address of the root node at the front of the file). It would be faster, simpler, more reliable, and use a lot less memory. The developer would still need transactional code for commit/rollback/recover, but a good chunk of code could (and all the bugs that come with it) could still be eliminated.
Either read TFA or pay closer attention. TFA says this could potentially replace both system RAM and solid-state (i.e. flash) drives, essentially replacing the two separate pieces of hardware with one. This wouldn't just make laptops faster and batteries last longer, it would be a paradigm-shifting change. The system memory IS the hard drive, and vice versa.
All of a sudden, all that buffering code written for dealing with files does nothing but slow the system down. Just treat the file pointer like a normal memory pointer.
So what do the installers do when they want to check to see if there's enough disk space to install an app? It always looks like there's no space. ;-)
I was talking about tighter integration than that. If you dedicate most of the memory to a ram disk, you won't be able to use 100GB of memory when you need it.
;-)
And don't tell me that no one needs 100GB of memory. I'm a developer, and I play around with personal programs that would love to have 100GB of memory to play with from time to time (usually math-heavy algorithms).