>As stupid of idea as I think missile defense >currently is (you invest in research before you >start building shit... we're just blowing our >money on rockets that can't hit the broad side >of a barn)
Maybe the people doing this aren't as incompetent as you think, and they have a system that works but they don't want to demonstrate it until it is too late for an adversary to build in counter measures.
You never know - all the hitech weapons systems developed before the first Gulf War seemed to work pretty well.
>I would love have seen 200bil on >missile defense instead of 200 bil + 100k lives >on an invasion
Exactly, because America has an advantage when it comes to spending money, but not when it comes to 'spending' lives.
It seems to me that if you spend enough money you can do anything which isn't disallowed by the physics. As far as I can see, there isn't any deep reason why missile defense is impossible. It doesn't even require particularly advanced tecnology, in fact nuclear tipped intereceptors were possible with even 1950's technology but banned by the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty.
If I were US President, I'd leave the ABM and start building a shitload of nuclear tipped interceptors. It would explain the rumours about the US developing a new range of micro-nukes better than the daft idea of using them as bunker busters.
And even if it doesn't work very well, you can always lie about it to North Korea, and threaten them with massive retaliation.
I didn't mean it like that. I'm not saying Star Trek: Voyager invented this stuff at all, it's a cliche and ST:V (actually ST:anything) annoyed me because it was a mass of cliches with and wooden characters. Same with pulp magazines in the 30's and 40's.
And it's worth pointing out that even though BSG is pretty enjoyable, it's not immune to this stuff.
It's too late to do anything about North Korea, because they have nuclear weapons and can deter a US attack. On the other hand it wasn't too late to do anything about Iraq, because they didn't yet have nuclear weapons that could deter an attack.
Actually, it's more subtle than that. Iraq certainly had chemical weapons before the first Gulf War, but was 'convinced' not to use them.
On the other hand, even before Korea had nukes, it had enough conventional artillery pointed at Seoul to deter a US attack. Nukes don't really change things.
Iraq mishandled the situation - they had these choices
1) Keep the WMD, tell the UN to fuck off and fight an apocalyptic non conventional battle with the US/UK. The US/UK win, but level the country in the process. 2) Give up the nukes, prove it to the US/UK and have no war. Saddam stays in power. Obviously it would be pretty hard to get away with this, but it's not impossible. Kind of like it was possible to avoid the first gulf war by a rapid and very public retreat from Kuwait, something James Baker described as a "nightmare scenario".
Neither of these were very appealing, so Saddam fiddled around and got a third option.
3) Destroy some of the weapons in secret, or maybe smuggle them to Syria. Not provide complete proof to the UN, let alone the US/UK. Get invaded and deposed. Not much damage to Irag during the invasion, but guerilla war against the invaders makes up for it.
Of course, if we hadn't have attacked, a resolution extending sanctions/no fly zones would eventually have been blocked by the French, Russians or Chinese, and then all those WMD programs would have restarted. They had the scientists, the money and a supplier, A Q Khan
And once they had nukes, they would have been able to do anything they like like North Korea got away with in the Clinton era - they would offer to give up their nuke programs in return for aid, then later we'd find that they lied and cut off aid, and then the cycle would start again.
I think the way to deal with the proliferation problem is to build a missile defense shield. You only need to be able to shoot down a dozen or so relatively low tech weapons initially, and then upgrade it to keep up with the worst case threat. You need to make it clear to the rogue states that you will definitely retaliate with lots nuclear weapons if any of theirs get through the defense shield too, presumably deterrence still works to some extent.
Of the alternatives invading countries is too risky (Iraq), and constructive engagement is just plain pointless (Iran, North Korea).
Of course, if a nuclear armed Iraq had attacked Kuwait/Saudi Arabia, it would leave you in a situation where you either do nothing or risk a nuclear war.
Why? The humanoid cylons are almost indistinguishable from us, it's not unreasonable they'd have some kind of religion.
Religion is inevitable if you are self aware and mortal I reckon - it's a myth that makes dying a more palatable prospect.
Some spoilers below
Actually the thing I liked about the series was the idea that it is clearly inspired by the War On Terror. There are scenes where cylons do suicide bombings, claim that the humans 'worship idols' and explain that they don't fear death because their soul will get downloaded to a new body. It's not quite 72 virgins but it's close.
And fighting such an implacable enemy has a corrosive effect on human society too - look at the torture scene, or the way the military gradually seems to be gradually taking over. They even need to shoot down a 'hijacked' ship, which may or may not contain civilians just after the cylons devastating 9/11 style suprise attack.
And the nice thing about the series is that it seems to be generally interested in exploring this stuff with relatively rounded characters rather than settling for two dimensional 'good' and 'bad' characters like most sci fi.
So the religious stuff is pretty key to the appeal of the show.
Seriously, Quantum Computers have enormous potential. E.g some people have argued that they might solve protein folding.
Quickly stated the problem is this. DNA contains a code which determines the sequence of amino acids in a protein. If you streteched out a protein, it would be a linear chain of amino acids - and this is the form the cell assembles it in. As the chain comes out of the assembly machine, it folds into a shape, and the shape determines what it does. We can find sequence of genes in the DNA that codes for a protein, so we can find the sequence of amino acids, but simulating the folding is really hard.
It has been estimated that a fast computer applying plausible rules for protein folding would need 10**127 years to find the final folded form for even a very short sequence of just 100 amino acids. Such a mathematical formulation of the protein-folding problem shows that it is NP-complete[6]. Yet Nature solves this problem in a few seconds. Since quantum computing can be exponentially faster than conventional computing, it could very well be the explanation for Nature's speed. The anomalous efficiency of other biological optimization processes may provide indirect evidence of underlying quantum processing if no classical explanation is forthcoming.
So nature exploits this stuff to solve problems many, many orders of magnitude faster than current computers. I'm sure if we understood it we'd get similar benefits.
Also, I hope that some things like consciousness which are inexplicable now, will be less inexplicable once we do. This is the best case scenario, admittedly. Mind you, given how optimal evolved organisms seem to be, it's hard to believe that they don't exploit quantum computing when they need to process information, unless there is some deep reason why they can't. Evolution certainly seems to exploit all the things we know about in it's 'designs'.
Even solving protein folding would be pretty cool. Imagine drug companies being able to sketch their desired protein shape, and have a machine that can work back to DNA. Even evolution will never be able to do that.
Cracking cryptography would be enough.Imagine the money you could make if you could divert 1% of global financial transactions to the chip company.
Actually you wouldn't need to develop it - you could charge the banks/pension funds money (e.g. one beeelion dollars) to not develop it. Oh, I mean, you'd give institutional shareholders votes on the technical steering comittee. Got to be careful of those pesky anti blackmail laws.
But for most of the last couple of years, the best performing x86 managed to run at a higher frequency than the best performing Risc, or turn in better SpecInt benchmarks - at least for single CPU, or sometimes both.
PC hardware tends to suck for multi CPU stuff though - even Opterons are a bit disappointing to be honest, considering that decent SMP performance was supposed to be one of the design goals. On the other hand, I don't think switching instruction sets would help here, it's something that will be fixed with multicore chips (because they make SMP more mainstream and thus more important) and better bus protocols - maybe AMD will license the Power5 one like they did for Alpha.
FP performance is a bit disappointing too - especially as the Athlon FX-55 result is with a decent 64 bit compiler - it's still a fair bit behind Itaniums and POWER5. On the other hand, how much mainstream computing is limited by FP performance?
Actually, Power5 does better than I'd expected - much better than PPC970, but it isn't enough to get people to switch from x86. Back in the Alpha days, Risc chips had a advantage in virtually all benchmarks, and conventional wisdom said that it would increase, but it still wasn't enough of an incentive to get significant numbers of people to switch over.
Which is my point really. It's not that x86 has an particularly good, it is that PPC and other Risc chips no longer better enough to make people switch.
Why? x86-64 does pretty well in benchmarks, and it's cheap as hell.
Even if you pick your chips for assembler elegance, x86-64 isn't too bad. Most of the x86isms that hampered performance are either not used anymore (e.g. segmentation) have been fixed to some extent or no longer matter much in a modern chip running modern code.
In the "fixed to some extent" I'd include the lack of integer registers - x86-64 has twice as many, the nasty FPU architecture - x86-64 uses SSE2 instead. Also, variable sized instructions can be executed efficiently if you transform them into uops and give a higher code density than a typical Risc, so you get better cache hit rates for a given cache size.
And by "modern code on a modern chip" I mean that if you look at the code that comes out of a modern compiler, it's almost as good you would have got on a clean Risc design, but you run it on a chip with a clock rate that is much faster than Risc chips manage, because the x86-64 world now has two companies competing, and they can both afford high end fab plants.
In fact I'd say that x86-64 will eventually kill all the Risc chips, PPC included in the desktop/server world. The embedded world is different of course.
I did so because describing something so complicated in such a small space was quite frankly the last thing I wanted to worry about after rewriting the cookie manager
As in "I was so tired after writing brilliant code that I wrote something deliciously whimsical when I should have explained it to lesser mortals... And now millions of people all over the world people love me for it. And it's great because in my invitation only team, I don't need to deal with people who aren't as cool as me. Oh no here come the paparazzi from slashdot, better take down my site and disable links from slashdot to bugzilla. Wow, life as an Internet celebrity is so hard"
I've worked with people like this. No matter how good they are at coding, sooner or later you'll find a situation where being the downside to their personality - unbelievable arrogance - far outways their technical abilities.
I'll cook all meats eaten by Muhammed (pbuh) in the hadith. I won't cook pork, because it is well known to be an unclean meat. I won't serve Jews, homosexuals or menstuating women because my mullah has told me not to - he gave my a quote from the Qu'ran about the homosexuals and the women and said he'd get back to me on one about Jews.
Nor will I serve Coca Cola, as it is known to support the American/Jew^WZionist world conspiracy, as documented in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Instead I serve Jihad Cola, made by Hezbollah in Syria, the proceeds of which go to the liberation of Palestine!
Of course, it never quite dawned on us in the beginning that everything we were doing would someday be so scrutinized by the public eye. When I added Cookies are delicious delicacies as the tongue-in-cheek description of site cookies in our Options window, I did so because describing something so complicated in such a small space was quite frankly the last thing I wanted to worry about after rewriting the cookie manager.
When I bought my Dell they said "Do you want the Standard one, or one that doesn't sterilise you by burning your crotch"
Dumb question really, what's more important to a geek - the theoretical possibility of kids in the distant future, or kick ass frame rates in Doom 3 now.
They don't use ActiveX for eye candy, they use it to make a Windows application look like a web application.
Where I work we have a bunch of web application sites which are completely ActiveX, but that's because they are basically Windows applications sitting in a browser window - imagine a bunch of Windows GUI controls in the browser talking to a back end running as an.exe that talks to Java application running on the server.
Originally I think it the client started off being a Windows App, but it was migrated to ActiveX so the users don't need to install/update it and (probably) to cash on the fashion for web applications.
But they irony is that the main benefit of web apps was that they were OS neutral, but ActiveX/Exe combo is actually even more tied to Windows a standalone exe, which might have worked on Wine.
Is it just me, or does she seem a bit too good to be true
1) She likes video games 2) She's hawt 3) Her name is German for "beer cooler"
I reckon there's some perl script out there generating these web pages and a press release to go with 'em. It could pass on emails from venture capital companies to a human scam artist.
Maybe someone forgot to disable it after the.com bust.
Its supposed to do 250GFlops when? 2 years from now? Apparently the Geforce 6800 Ultra will do 40GFlops and thats today.... extrapolate with some doubling here and there it seems a lot more reasonable
And a Geforce 6800 probably costs as much as a whole PS3 with the Cell chip.
Mind you, as others have pointed out this article is confusing the peak performance with average performance. And as the chips like the i960 show, that gives a highly misleading impression of what the chip can do.
I'd guess this the PS3 with a Cell and low end Nvidia GPU will end up running the same sort of games as a fast PC with a high end Nvidia GPU but in a much cheaper system. Which is no mean feat when you think about.
Slashdot Mirror
>As stupid of idea as I think missile defense >currently is (you invest in research before you >start building shit... we're just blowing our >money on rockets that can't hit the broad side >of a barn)
Maybe the people doing this aren't as incompetent as you think, and they have a system that works but they don't want to demonstrate it until it is too late for an adversary to build in counter measures.
You never know - all the hitech weapons systems developed before the first Gulf War seemed to work pretty well.
>I would love have seen 200bil on
>missile defense instead of 200 bil + 100k lives
>on an invasion
Exactly, because America has an advantage when it comes to spending money, but not when it comes to 'spending' lives.
It seems to me that if you spend enough money you can do anything which isn't disallowed by the physics. As far as I can see, there isn't any deep reason why missile defense is impossible. It doesn't even require particularly advanced tecnology, in fact nuclear tipped intereceptors were possible with even 1950's technology but banned by the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty.
If I were US President, I'd leave the ABM and start building a shitload of nuclear tipped interceptors. It would explain the rumours about the US developing a new range of micro-nukes better than the daft idea of using them as bunker busters.
And even if it doesn't work very well, you can always lie about it to North Korea, and threaten them with massive retaliation.
I didn't mean it like that. I'm not saying Star Trek: Voyager invented this stuff at all, it's a cliche and ST:V (actually ST:anything) annoyed me because it was a mass of cliches with and wooden characters. Same with pulp magazines in the 30's and 40's.
And it's worth pointing out that even though BSG is pretty enjoyable, it's not immune to this stuff.
It's too late to do anything about North Korea, because they have nuclear weapons and can deter a US attack. On the other hand it wasn't too late to do anything about Iraq, because they didn't yet have nuclear weapons that could deter an attack.
/ aziz/3.html
Actually, it's more subtle than that. Iraq certainly had chemical weapons before the first Gulf War, but was 'convinced' not to use them.
(Interview with Tariq Aziz)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral
On the other hand, even before Korea had nukes, it had enough conventional artillery pointed at Seoul to deter a US attack. Nukes don't really change things.
Iraq mishandled the situation - they had these choices
n /k han.htm
1) Keep the WMD, tell the UN to fuck off and fight an apocalyptic non conventional battle with the US/UK. The US/UK win, but level the country in the process.
2) Give up the nukes, prove it to the US/UK and have no war. Saddam stays in power. Obviously it would be pretty hard to get away with this, but it's not impossible. Kind of like it was possible to avoid the first gulf war by a rapid and very public retreat from Kuwait, something James Baker described as a "nightmare scenario".
Neither of these were very appealing, so Saddam fiddled around and got a third option.
3) Destroy some of the weapons in secret, or maybe smuggle them to Syria. Not provide complete proof to the UN, let alone the US/UK. Get invaded and deposed. Not much damage to Irag during the invasion, but guerilla war against the invaders makes up for it.
Of course, if we hadn't have attacked, a resolution extending sanctions/no fly zones would eventually have been blocked by the French, Russians or Chinese, and then all those WMD programs would have restarted. They had the scientists, the money and a supplier, A Q Khan
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/pakista
And once they had nukes, they would have been able to do anything they like like North Korea got away with in the Clinton era - they would offer to give up their nuke programs in return for aid, then later we'd find that they lied and cut off aid, and then the cycle would start again.
I think the way to deal with the proliferation problem is to build a missile defense shield. You only need to be able to shoot down a dozen or so relatively low tech weapons initially, and then upgrade it to keep up with the worst case threat. You need to make it clear to the rogue states that you will definitely retaliate with lots nuclear weapons if any of theirs get through the defense shield too, presumably deterrence still works to some extent.
Of the alternatives invading countries is too risky (Iraq), and constructive engagement is just plain pointless (Iran, North Korea).
Of course, if a nuclear armed Iraq had attacked Kuwait/Saudi Arabia, it would leave you in a situation where you either do nothing or risk a nuclear war.
You mean 6 Of Nine, or whatever her name is?
Thanks. Whenever ones raves about how great this show, it's good to remind them that it copied a character from Startrek Voyager
Why? The humanoid cylons are almost indistinguishable from us, it's not unreasonable they'd have some kind of religion.
Religion is inevitable if you are self aware and mortal I reckon - it's a myth that makes dying a more palatable prospect.
Some spoilers below
Actually the thing I liked about the series was the idea that it is clearly inspired by the War On Terror. There are scenes where cylons do suicide bombings, claim that the humans 'worship idols' and explain that they don't fear death because their soul will get downloaded to a new body. It's not quite 72 virgins but it's close.
And fighting such an implacable enemy has a corrosive effect on human society too - look at the torture scene, or the way the military gradually seems to be gradually taking over. They even need to shoot down a 'hijacked' ship, which may or may not contain civilians just after the cylons devastating 9/11 style suprise attack.
And the nice thing about the series is that it seems to be generally interested in exploring this stuff with relatively rounded characters rather than settling for two dimensional 'good' and 'bad' characters like most sci fi.
So the religious stuff is pretty key to the appeal of the show.
At some point in this thread we'll need the moderation -1 Limey Spoiler.
Quickly stated the problem is this. DNA contains a code which determines the sequence of amino acids in a protein. If you streteched out a protein, it would be a linear chain of amino acids - and this is the form the cell assembles it in. As the chain comes out of the assembly machine, it folds into a shape, and the shape determines what it does. We can find sequence of genes in the DNA that codes for a protein, so we can find the sequence of amino acids, but simulating the folding is really hard.
http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/agents.pdf
So nature exploits this stuff to solve problems many, many orders of magnitude faster than current computers. I'm sure if we understood it we'd get similar benefits.
Also, I hope that some things like consciousness which are inexplicable now, will be less inexplicable once we do. This is the best case scenario, admittedly. Mind you, given how optimal evolved organisms seem to be, it's hard to believe that they don't exploit quantum computing when they need to process information, unless there is some deep reason why they can't. Evolution certainly seems to exploit all the things we know about in it's 'designs'.
Even solving protein folding would be pretty cool. Imagine drug companies being able to sketch their desired protein shape, and have a machine that can work back to DNA. Even evolution will never be able to do that.
Cracking cryptography would be enough.Imagine the money you could make if you could divert 1% of global financial transactions to the chip company.
Actually you wouldn't need to develop it - you could charge the banks/pension funds money (e.g. one beeelion dollars) to not develop it. Oh, I mean, you'd give institutional shareholders votes on the technical steering comittee. Got to be careful of those pesky anti blackmail laws.
I can't stand trekkies myself, but I wouldn't be as rude to them if they paid my salary.
Intel chips are x86-64 too, and they run up to 3.8Ghz.
Not that it helps them much on Spec benchmarks -
http://www.aceshardware.com/SPECmine/top.jsp
But for most of the last couple of years, the best performing x86 managed to run at a higher frequency than the best performing Risc, or turn in better SpecInt benchmarks - at least for single CPU, or sometimes both.
PC hardware tends to suck for multi CPU stuff though - even Opterons are a bit disappointing to be honest, considering that decent SMP performance was supposed to be one of the design goals. On the other hand, I don't think switching instruction sets would help here, it's something that will be fixed with multicore chips (because they make SMP more mainstream and thus more important) and better bus protocols - maybe AMD will license the Power5 one like they did for Alpha.
FP performance is a bit disappointing too - especially as the Athlon FX-55 result is with a decent 64 bit compiler - it's still a fair bit behind Itaniums and POWER5. On the other hand, how much mainstream computing is limited by FP performance?
Actually, Power5 does better than I'd expected - much better than PPC970, but it isn't enough to get people to switch from x86. Back in the Alpha days, Risc chips had a advantage in virtually all benchmarks, and conventional wisdom said that it would increase, but it still wasn't enough of an incentive to get significant numbers of people to switch over.
Which is my point really. It's not that x86 has an particularly good, it is that PPC and other Risc chips no longer better enough to make people switch.
Why? x86-64 does pretty well in benchmarks, and it's cheap as hell.
Even if you pick your chips for assembler elegance, x86-64 isn't too bad. Most of the x86isms that hampered performance are either not used anymore (e.g. segmentation) have been fixed to some extent or no longer matter much in a modern chip running modern code.
In the "fixed to some extent" I'd include the lack of integer registers - x86-64 has twice as many, the nasty FPU architecture - x86-64 uses SSE2 instead. Also, variable sized instructions can be executed efficiently if you transform them into uops and give a higher code density than a typical Risc, so you get better cache hit rates for a given cache size.
And by "modern code on a modern chip" I mean that if you look at the code that comes out of a modern compiler, it's almost as good you would have got on a clean Risc design, but you run it on a chip with a clock rate that is much faster than Risc chips manage, because the x86-64 world now has two companies competing, and they can both afford high end fab plants.
In fact I'd say that x86-64 will eventually kill all the Risc chips, PPC included in the desktop/server world. The embedded world is different of course.
Having your box owned will be much more serious.
Ha, now the f**kers will remember to keep their boxes updated.
Having a degree doesn't make you engineer, solving problems does.
Sorry tbat should have read
<Gene Hackman>
Why we may be able to print people one day
</Gene Hackman>
Will anyone get the reference to the Best.Scifi.Evar?
Why we may be able to print people one day
That sounds like a euphemism.
As in "I was so tired after writing brilliant code that I wrote something deliciously whimsical when I should have explained it to lesser mortals
I've worked with people like this. No matter how good they are at coding, sooner or later you'll find a situation where being the downside to their personality - unbelievable arrogance - far outways their technical abilities.
My BBQ isn't biased.
I'll cook all meats eaten by Muhammed (pbuh) in the hadith. I won't cook pork, because it is well known to be an unclean meat. I won't serve Jews, homosexuals or menstuating women because my mullah has told me not to - he gave my a quote from the Qu'ran about the homosexuals and the women and said he'd get back to me on one about Jews.
Nor will I serve Coca Cola, as it is known to support the American/Jew^WZionist world conspiracy, as documented in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Instead I serve Jihad Cola, made by Hezbollah in Syria, the proceeds of which go to the liberation of Palestine!
What a wanker.
PC's aren't like that.
When I bought my Dell they said "Do you want the Standard one, or one that doesn't sterilise you by burning your crotch"
Dumb question really, what's more important to a geek - the theoretical possibility of kids in the distant future, or kick ass frame rates in Doom 3 now.
They don't use ActiveX for eye candy, they use it to make a Windows application look like a web application.
.exe that talks to Java application running on the server.
Where I work we have a bunch of web application sites which are completely ActiveX, but that's because they are basically Windows applications sitting in a browser window - imagine a bunch of Windows GUI controls in the browser talking to a back end running as an
Originally I think it the client started off being a Windows App, but it was migrated to ActiveX so the users don't need to install/update it and (probably) to cash on the fashion for web applications.
But they irony is that the main benefit of web apps was that they were OS neutral, but ActiveX/Exe combo is actually even more tied to Windows a standalone exe, which might have worked on Wine.
You can already install Service Packs on a less than legitimate copy of XP
k b; EN-US;328874
You need a XP Keygen and this helpful KB article
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
And auto update works, but you can't install non critical updates unless you go through a verification stage.
So it seems that the policy is that people that pay get support and non critical updates. People that don't pay get critical updates and SP1/2 only.
Is it just me, or does she seem a bit too good to be true
.com bust.
1) She likes video games
2) She's hawt
3) Her name is German for "beer cooler"
I reckon there's some perl script out there generating these web pages and a press release to go with 'em. It could pass on emails from venture capital companies to a human scam artist.
Maybe someone forgot to disable it after the
And a Geforce 6800 probably costs as much as a whole PS3 with the Cell chip.
Mind you, as others have pointed out this article is confusing the peak performance with average performance. And as the chips like the i960 show, that gives a highly misleading impression of what the chip can do.
I'd guess this the PS3 with a Cell and low end Nvidia GPU will end up running the same sort of games as a fast PC with a high end Nvidia GPU but in a much cheaper system. Which is no mean feat when you think about.