From the summary: will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy,'"
The plots cannot be taken out of context from the book they are presented in, for example here is the "plot" of animal farm:
Animals overthrow cruel/greedy humans to try to set up utopian society, true believers in the revolution pushed out, some use revolution for own goals, end up just like humans
Doesn't do the book much justice(not to mention doesn't contain one of the best sentences in all of English literature: "4 legs good, 2 legs bad"). You can't have anything but superficial discourse(make slashdot joke here) if all you are familiar with is a vague outline of the plot....
Your comment is so vapid as to be worthless. Open source is just another software development/distribution model with it's own benefits and drawbacks. Nothing more, nothing less. People on here seem to think that by adding the word "open source" to something it will automagically be able to singlehandedly cure cancer, solve world hunger, and make Julian fries. It doesn't always work like that. Take your post for example:
on the other hand, open source means anyone (with the skills) can take matters in to their own hands and address these issues to a higher standard than a commercial product, eventually.
A claim so vague that it can't be verified or invalidated. WTF do you mean by "higher standard"? That seems to imply that there exists a single optimum solution to the problem that will make everyone happy. Well, if you have it I would like to hear it. Meanwhile, in the real world the "higher standards" dependend on both personal preference and problem domain. For example, is Linux at a "higher standard" than Windows? Depends on who you ask and in what context. Even in the open source world there are often competing(occaisionally conflicting) ideas on how to solve a particular problem, competition is good!
Where as in a big profit motivated company may not want to spend time and money to go beyond covering the majority.
Care to back this up? Or even explain how open source is really all that different? I have a lot of niche needs, and I find that open source doesn't cover them as often as it does. I use a propietary OS(Mac OS X) that covers a lot of my niche needs very well. I also use some other propietary software(in the realm of language learning) that is outside the majority, but it works rather well. There are open source alternatives, but they don't work as well for me personally. Does that mean they don't neccasarily work well for you? Of course not! Does the ideology put behind the product have any bearing on how well it functions? Again, not really. Thats not to say I don't use FOSS, on the contrary, I also use FOSS products that meet other demands that I have(I use emacs to write Ruby programs). So what was your point again?
What is it with these vacuous fanboy comments on slashdot anyway?
tablet pc and a PDA? I always considered Tablets to be much closer to laptops than they are to PDAs, but this device really looks like it is a lot closer to a PDA than a tablet. It's not that big, and the picture from TFA has a guy holding it with one hand.
For example, what kind of test did he use? Most of the HIV tests actually test for antibodies, not the HIV virus itself. It is completely possible, and does happen on occaision, that the body will produce antibodies that are similiar to HIV antibodies but there is no HIV in the body. The antibodies don't do anything, but they do confirm the presence of the virus. The body then could have later stopped producing the antibodies.
risk of being jobless when you come out of it. If you start looking right away then you will have a year to find a position, but of course you can't tell your future employer that you will be available in a year, they will just move on to the next person. So I would ask for at least 2-3 months pay as severance, and health insurance for at least 6 months after you finish the job. That would give you really 6 months to find a job(since you can start looking about 3 months before your start date) and who knows, maybe you could land a job right away and basically get an extra 3 months salary.
Not sure how much faster it would be really(though I'm writing this from a powerbook and I really wish they would release some ppc stuff). A PPC chip acts as the controller but the actual proccessing is done on chips with architectures vastly different from both x86 and PPC, For instance, they aren't superscalar so they do no branch prediction like both x86 and PPC do...so really the emulation speed is pretty independent of it's host architecture. I suppose they could use the Altivec found on Apple's CPUs to simulate some of the SIMD instructions better, but remember the only CPU that IBM makes with an altivec unit is the G5s it makes for Apple, not exactly it's core busiiness.
You don't understand scarcity correctly. How "scarce" is land in the US? If you are talking about the middle of North Dakota, not all that scarce. If you are talking about downtown NYC, then it's pretty damn scarce. Even if you could create as much land as you wanted, that wouldn't mean the land would lose it's value. The land near popular destinations would still have value, perhaps not as much value, but it is still scarce. So therefore, even if they had unlimited land there would still be scarcity.
Uh, there is a difference between the XBox 360CORE which the grandparent mentioned and the full blown system. You obviously didn't read the article you linked to.....
Is there a problem with under estimating your own abilities? I can't tell you how many times I was convinced that I failed a test only to find out I got an A or a B(conversely more often then not when I felt that I aced a test I actually ended up wiht a poor grade). What pyschological motivations are behind under estimators?
laskjdfl'iasiejfrloiWAIJERFL'AEWJHIEFRLOIeijrwflo' ihaergo'sjgvlajkdnsfo;aiewhjrfo'iheargto'iaejhrgto llienargoiaqew90tu8jaet['0o89hW2JT['0ONGT[0aqgnf[0 aq83nv[0o8aqhgr[ohgerf[oiQ3HJBRO[IWAENR [O8NV0[AQH9G0[AQ98NT0EOGHAO;INGL;ADKDNVAL;DIHFIGLO GROPAREUG[OIJERGFO9[8YERTT[908ET[098URET0[9AUEGT[9 087UAERGFOVINJA0FR9U7AE0O[UFAO'SIDJFA0O[8UF0[9ZUS8 FDPA9E8RG0[98AUER0[9898U35408997540WQ387450W93Q847 5O[QP[EIJRTO[A[INSO[AISGFL;IAEJHRG;LAKDFG;LKJNAJKE GF;OVIJNAEO;VNADLKNAD;LKFNJADS;LFGKJADS;LFKJAS;LDF KJAEO;;OAEI;RHG;LNERG;;LEAKRNT;LAKDKRJ;;LDKAFG;LKA SKDJF;ALSKDJFAY RTOAIUEWRO;QIEHRFNVDO[D'8BEADX'OVINQREADBO'HJNN
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Our forefathers were purposely vague when they wrote the Constitution believing that outside of certain inalienable rights, our laws and interpretations should fit the world in which we live. Laws have to be changed in order to adjust to both changes in society at large and based on an individual's circumstances. One reason laws should be more flexible is that there is no way legislators can predict how technology will change and shape the future of the land in which they govern. Furthermore, as times change, society changes as well, but if the law stays static, now acceptable behavior could be conceived as criminal. Laws also have to be open to interpretation as it is very difficult to stipulate exactly what the lawmakers language really means when a case is being tried. Also, especially in a land such as the United States where individuality is essential to the national character, society has to take into account individual circumstances when metting out punishment.
In today's society technology is changing at a breakneck pace and even with flexible laws legislators just cannot keep up with the latest breakthroughs. If the laws are not allowed to be changed, actions that can be incredibly disruptive to society could not be controlled because there are no stipulations that would make said actions illegal. For example, recently in Britain charges were dropped against a teenager who decided to deluge his former employers email systems with about 5 million emails within the span of a few minutes. In technical terms this is called a "Denial of Service" attack and can be very devastating. However, Britain's network security laws were over 15 years old and thus did not take into account an individual having vast amounts of network resources at their disposal so they did not make "Denial of Service" attacks illegal. Even though the individual wreaked havoc on his former employer's systems the charges had to be dropped because it was legal at the time of the attack. Clearly if as we are becoming more and more dependant on technology we need the laws to act as an effective deterrent against cybercrime.
In addition to technological changes, society also changes its moral and ethical values and the laws need to be able to change to reflect that.
Not to mention supply problems. Its one thing to go on newegg and order the latest and greatest AMD CPU. It's another thing entirely to use over a million per quarter. I just don't think AMD has the production capacity to keep Apple as well as it's current customers happy. Intel has much more production capacity than AMD does right now...
that Microsoft is not coming off an abysmal failure of a console, it's coming from a console that did relatively well. It seems a lot of people were just so tired of Sega constantly releasing overpriced hardware(eg 32x, Genesis CD, Sega Saturn) with a very limited software selection that they just gave up on Sega and wouldn't even give the Dreamcast a try. Of course Sony's overhyped PS2 announcement didn't help either, but I don't think that was the main cause of the demise of the dreamcast. Microsoft(in the realm of video games anyway) is coming off a somewhat surprising hit with the XBox, a relatively long lived console with lots of games to choose from. They could still fail, but I don't think it will be for the same reasons the Dreamcast failed.
Because it comes from a site called "Open source energy" and here on/. Open Source is canon, therefore all you need to do is mention those words and you are guarenteed to get your story accepted. Ask Slashdot is by far the worst(but not the only) offender in this regard. People just tack on the word FOSS just to ensure their article will get accepted. If that word isn't there, your chances of getting accepted drop significantly. Slashdot has turned into a religious organization, not a a news site
I'm a bit too paranoid to type my Amazon user name and password into a site that isn't on the main amazon.com domain....I can't find it mentioned anywhere on amazon's main site. Can somebody a little bit less of a wuss tell me if it is legit?
if you eat the right stuff. Some diets recommend you eat 5 small meals a day instead of 3 bigger meals. Why? There is a significant "fixed cost" to digesting food, ie the amount of calories you burn to digest any amount of food, however after you pay the fixed cost the incremental cost is quite small. So you are actually doing yourself a favor if you snack on stuff like carrots and apples during the day. Esp. since your body has to do more work to break down carrots and apples than it does a Snickers bar.....
A company that can't survive shouldn't survive just because it has a certain ideology or supports stuff that does. SGI can't figure out how to make money in todays environment, end of story. They had a wonderful go at it, but all great things must one day end.....
Improvements in memory speed crawl compared to improvements in CPU speed, however larger caches can mitigate this problem to a certain extent, so why is it that growth in cache size continues to crawl? The Apple G5 updates FINALLY gave us 1mb l2 cache per core(and of course the industry standard 64k L1 cache per core) and whil the Intel/AMD world is slightly better in this regard, it's not by much. So why is it so hard to increase cache size?(of course you will need good cache allocation/replacement policies to go with them)? I'm not trolling, I honestly want to know. I realize that the people that design these chips are a lot smarter than I, but so far I haven't really seen a good reason why they don't increase cache size.
Also, outside of the HPC world, it seems very few programmers optimize their cache usage. Are there any tools(open source or otherwise) that can actually help you locate/fix inefficient uses of cache?
I know they are a god like organization here on/., but them calling this anti-cheating software "spyware" is just plain stupid. You don't like the software? It ain't all that hard to cancel you subscription and uninstall the software. There, you aren't being spied on. You can't tell Blizzard what to do with their servers just because you don't like it. Either use the free market and don't use the software or shut up.
If you take nature at as a model(tenous at best) then actually the MOST virulent viruses are the least likely to cause pandemics. Why? Because they burn out so fast the victims aren't nearly as likely to spread them. Take ebola for example, it's a horrible virus but it killed it's victims so quickly it never spread very far outside of Africa. That is why they are concerned about the fact that the bird flu this time around is killing LESS people, gives it more of a chance to mutate and become wide-spread. Remember the Spanish Influenza that killed so many people only had a fatality rate of around 5%.
No, the sneakier viruses won't ruin your box, they will just sit there and gather information. I would much rather have my email and personal documents destroyed then had them read. Even if you read them then destroy them, I know they have been compromised and can take whatever steps deemed neccessary to mitigate my risk. The most sinister viruses would just read and transmit them without me ever knowing.....
Slashdot Mirror
From the summary: will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy,'"
The plots cannot be taken out of context from the book they are presented in, for example here is the "plot" of animal farm:
Animals overthrow cruel/greedy humans to try to set up utopian society, true believers in the revolution pushed out, some use revolution for own goals, end up just like humans
Doesn't do the book much justice(not to mention doesn't contain one of the best sentences in all of English literature: "4 legs good, 2 legs bad"). You can't have anything but superficial discourse(make slashdot joke here) if all you are familiar with is a vague outline of the plot....
Your comment is so vapid as to be worthless. Open source is just another software development/distribution model with it's own benefits and drawbacks. Nothing more, nothing less. People on here seem to think that by adding the word "open source" to something it will automagically be able to singlehandedly cure cancer, solve world hunger, and make Julian fries. It doesn't always work like that. Take your post for example:
on the other hand, open source means anyone (with the skills) can take matters in to their own hands and address these issues to a higher standard than a commercial product, eventually.
A claim so vague that it can't be verified or invalidated. WTF do you mean by "higher standard"? That seems to imply that there exists a single optimum solution to the problem that will make everyone happy. Well, if you have it I would like to hear it. Meanwhile, in the real world the "higher standards" dependend on both personal preference and problem domain. For example, is Linux at a "higher standard" than Windows? Depends on who you ask and in what context. Even in the open source world there are often competing(occaisionally conflicting) ideas on how to solve a particular problem, competition is good!
Where as in a big profit motivated company may not want to spend time and money to go beyond covering the majority.
Care to back this up? Or even explain how open source is really all that different? I have a lot of niche needs, and I find that open source doesn't cover them as often as it does. I use a propietary OS(Mac OS X) that covers a lot of my niche needs very well. I also use some other propietary software(in the realm of language learning) that is outside the majority, but it works rather well. There are open source alternatives, but they don't work as well for me personally. Does that mean they don't neccasarily work well for you? Of course not! Does the ideology put behind the product have any bearing on how well it functions? Again, not really. Thats not to say I don't use FOSS, on the contrary, I also use FOSS products that meet other demands that I have(I use emacs to write Ruby programs). So what was your point again?
What is it with these vacuous fanboy comments on slashdot anyway?
tablet pc and a PDA? I always considered Tablets to be much closer to laptops than they are to PDAs, but this device really looks like it is a lot closer to a PDA than a tablet. It's not that big, and the picture from TFA has a guy holding it with one hand.
This is slashdot, the truth has no meaning here! Go back to your groupthink at once, you want to be a good /. citizen, don't you?
For example, what kind of test did he use? Most of the HIV tests actually test for antibodies, not the HIV virus itself. It is completely possible, and does happen on occaision, that the body will produce antibodies that are similiar to HIV antibodies but there is no HIV in the body. The antibodies don't do anything, but they do confirm the presence of the virus. The body then could have later stopped producing the antibodies.
risk of being jobless when you come out of it. If you start looking right away then you will have a year to find a position, but of course you can't tell your future employer that you will be available in a year, they will just move on to the next person. So I would ask for at least 2-3 months pay as severance, and health insurance for at least 6 months after you finish the job. That would give you really 6 months to find a job(since you can start looking about 3 months before your start date) and who knows, maybe you could land a job right away and basically get an extra 3 months salary.
to learn to spell one of these days...
Not sure how much faster it would be really(though I'm writing this from a powerbook and I really wish they would release some ppc stuff). A PPC chip acts as the controller but the actual proccessing is done on chips with architectures vastly different from both x86 and PPC, For instance, they aren't superscalar so they do no branch prediction like both x86 and PPC do...so really the emulation speed is pretty independent of it's host architecture. I suppose they could use the Altivec found on Apple's CPUs to simulate some of the SIMD instructions better, but remember the only CPU that IBM makes with an altivec unit is the G5s it makes for Apple, not exactly it's core busiiness.
You don't understand scarcity correctly. How "scarce" is land in the US? If you are talking about the middle of North Dakota, not all that scarce. If you are talking about downtown NYC, then it's pretty damn scarce. Even if you could create as much land as you wanted, that wouldn't mean the land would lose it's value. The land near popular destinations would still have value, perhaps not as much value, but it is still scarce. So therefore, even if they had unlimited land there would still be scarcity.
Uh, there is a difference between the XBox 360CORE which the grandparent mentioned and the full blown system. You obviously didn't read the article you linked to.....
Is there a problem with under estimating your own abilities? I can't tell you how many times I was convinced that I failed a test only to find out I got an A or a B(conversely more often then not when I felt that I aced a test I actually ended up wiht a poor grade). What pyschological motivations are behind under estimators?
laskjdfl'iasiejfrloiWAIJERFL'AEWJHIEFRLOIeijrwflo' ihaergo'sjgvlajkdnsfo;aiewhjrfo'iheargto'iaejhrgto llienargoiaqew90tu8jaet['0o89hW2JT['0ONGT[0aqgnf[0 aq83nv[0o8aqhgr[ohgerf[oiQ3HJBRO[IWAENR [O8NV0[AQH9G0[AQ98NT0EOGHAO;INGL;ADKDNVAL;DIHFIGLO GROPAREUG[OIJERGFO9[8YERTT[908ET[098URET0[9AUEGT[9 087UAERGFOVINJA0FR9U7AE0O[UFAO'SIDJFA0O[8UF0[9ZUS8 FDPA9E8RG0[98AUER0[9898U35408997540WQ387450W93Q847 5O[QP[EIJRTO[A[INSO[AISGFL;IAEJHRG;LAKDFG;LKJNAJKE GF;OVIJNAEO;VNADLKNAD;LKFNJADS;LFGKJADS;LFKJAS;LDF KJAEO;;OAEI;RHG;LNERG;;LEAKRNT;LAKDKRJ;;LDKAFG;LKA SKDJF;ALSKDJFAY RTOAIUEWRO;QIEHRFNVDO[D'8BEADX'OVINQREADBO'HJNN X,.CMNVB;KLDZNGVL/JZDDSLGNZ;'SDF'AZSDJF]AW\EFaw\ef a\ewRFJAE-WER=FAQW3R3WQ4-[Q3W=QEW=RAEFU0[ER9U+_+_( *&^%%^YGGGGHG^TY&*UIJHKGYUT&*(UIJHUYGU*&YUIHGFTYR^ &Y*UIHGYFTYR&Y*UIHGT^&*IUJHGYUT&*UIOJHGTY&*UIJHGYT U&*UIOY&*UIOUJHUYTU*OIJDFHAE90[9PJHFIEPA980OR7UOJF GHNAEIDPF980[G9IPJLKKHJIYDUFSOPIOjkas,df;l.jkasdfk l;iajksdfnkl;qeiuwjrho9p3w83invdp9aowuidfnpa9eiofn u 89ae0e8nfaqpehow8;airwgfuyakl;guhasd;ofiuyaesp09w4 8ruyqUFYOA;DUYFAPOKSDUGYFOAYHSDFLK;UYAIEWR;IOUQTR; OQEIUHGO[AIDSNDFOIEUAFN9onf9q3fnaodsijfloiuhlotlqi jrtop[8eawrtuy 9--aqer7r8uo[8aesdufo[8ae89urw098qeg9-8adhvpoaeser ihrufoi;quo;q3uin5rq3o;iu4h5r9p[qp38709a8eruf098ae f709a8sdfuo[aseifuo[iq3jn45;onu34poqe4ijqo'34iht5l oihj5oqij435o;ij34q5lo;in43hn
Our forefathers were purposely vague when they wrote the Constitution believing that outside of certain inalienable rights, our laws and interpretations should fit the world in which we live. Laws have to be changed in order to adjust to both changes in society at large and based on an individual's circumstances. One reason laws should be more flexible is that there is no way legislators can predict how technology will change and shape the future of the land in which they govern. Furthermore, as times change, society changes as well, but if the law stays static, now acceptable behavior could be conceived as criminal. Laws also have to be open to interpretation as it is very difficult to stipulate exactly what the lawmakers language really means when a case is being tried. Also, especially in a land such as the United States where individuality is essential to the national character, society has to take into account individual circumstances when metting out punishment.
In today's society technology is changing at a breakneck pace and even with flexible laws legislators just cannot keep up with the latest breakthroughs. If the laws are not allowed to be changed, actions that can be incredibly disruptive to society could not be controlled because there are no stipulations that would make said actions illegal. For example, recently in Britain charges were dropped against a teenager who decided to deluge his former employers email systems with about 5 million emails within the span of a few minutes. In technical terms this is called a "Denial of Service" attack and can be very devastating. However, Britain's network security laws were over 15 years old and thus did not take into account an individual having vast amounts of network resources at their disposal so they did not make "Denial of Service" attacks illegal. Even though the individual wreaked havoc on his former employer's systems the charges had to be dropped because it was legal at the time of the attack. Clearly if as we are becoming more and more dependant on technology we need the laws to act as an effective deterrent against cybercrime.
In addition to technological changes, society also changes its moral and ethical values and the laws need to be able to change to reflect that.
Not to mention supply problems. Its one thing to go on newegg and order the latest and greatest AMD CPU. It's another thing entirely to use over a million per quarter. I just don't think AMD has the production capacity to keep Apple as well as it's current customers happy. Intel has much more production capacity than AMD does right now...
that Microsoft is not coming off an abysmal failure of a console, it's coming from a console that did relatively well. It seems a lot of people were just so tired of Sega constantly releasing overpriced hardware(eg 32x, Genesis CD, Sega Saturn) with a very limited software selection that they just gave up on Sega and wouldn't even give the Dreamcast a try. Of course Sony's overhyped PS2 announcement didn't help either, but I don't think that was the main cause of the demise of the dreamcast. Microsoft(in the realm of video games anyway) is coming off a somewhat surprising hit with the XBox, a relatively long lived console with lots of games to choose from. They could still fail, but I don't think it will be for the same reasons the Dreamcast failed.
Because it comes from a site called "Open source energy" and here on /. Open Source is canon, therefore all you need to do is mention those words and you are guarenteed to get your story accepted. Ask Slashdot is by far the worst(but not the only) offender in this regard. People just tack on the word FOSS just to ensure their article will get accepted. If that word isn't there, your chances of getting accepted drop significantly. Slashdot has turned into a religious organization, not a a news site
from the cumputing-meets-shop-class dept.
Um, I think I will keep my "cumputing" as far away from the milling machine as possible....
I'm a bit too paranoid to type my Amazon user name and password into a site that isn't on the main amazon.com domain....I can't find it mentioned anywhere on amazon's main site. Can somebody a little bit less of a wuss tell me if it is legit?
if you eat the right stuff. Some diets recommend you eat 5 small meals a day instead of 3 bigger meals. Why? There is a significant "fixed cost" to digesting food, ie the amount of calories you burn to digest any amount of food, however after you pay the fixed cost the incremental cost is quite small. So you are actually doing yourself a favor if you snack on stuff like carrots and apples during the day. Esp. since your body has to do more work to break down carrots and apples than it does a Snickers bar.....
ElevatedBiowarePandemic, perfect!
A company that can't survive shouldn't survive just because it has a certain ideology or supports stuff that does. SGI can't figure out how to make money in todays environment, end of story. They had a wonderful go at it, but all great things must one day end.....
Improvements in memory speed crawl compared to improvements in CPU speed, however larger caches can mitigate this problem to a certain extent, so why is it that growth in cache size continues to crawl? The Apple G5 updates FINALLY gave us 1mb l2 cache per core(and of course the industry standard 64k L1 cache per core) and whil the Intel/AMD world is slightly better in this regard, it's not by much. So why is it so hard to increase cache size?(of course you will need good cache allocation/replacement policies to go with them)? I'm not trolling, I honestly want to know. I realize that the people that design these chips are a lot smarter than I, but so far I haven't really seen a good reason why they don't increase cache size.
Also, outside of the HPC world, it seems very few programmers optimize their cache usage. Are there any tools(open source or otherwise) that can actually help you locate/fix inefficient uses of cache?
I know they are a god like organization here on /., but them calling this anti-cheating software "spyware" is just plain stupid. You don't like the software? It ain't all that hard to cancel you subscription and uninstall the software. There, you aren't being spied on. You can't tell Blizzard what to do with their servers just because you don't like it. Either use the free market and don't use the software or shut up.
If you take nature at as a model(tenous at best) then actually the MOST virulent viruses are the least likely to cause pandemics. Why? Because they burn out so fast the victims aren't nearly as likely to spread them. Take ebola for example, it's a horrible virus but it killed it's victims so quickly it never spread very far outside of Africa. That is why they are concerned about the fact that the bird flu this time around is killing LESS people, gives it more of a chance to mutate and become wide-spread. Remember the Spanish Influenza that killed so many people only had a fatality rate of around 5%.
No, the sneakier viruses won't ruin your box, they will just sit there and gather information. I would much rather have my email and personal documents destroyed then had them read. Even if you read them then destroy them, I know they have been compromised and can take whatever steps deemed neccessary to mitigate my risk. The most sinister viruses would just read and transmit them without me ever knowing.....
The powerPC is fully virtualizable, thats really how mac on linux works. It's x86 that lacks virtualization support....
Interestingly enough, I put an iPod through the washing machine...it doesn't work anymore...maybe I used the wrong machine..