On a side note, that was filmed in the Microsoft Research building, and many people there run OSX. Interestingly enough, you are allowed to use any platform you want as a Microsoft employee (I've even met Linux users who work there), but the Gates Foundation mandates you use only Microsoft products (source: friend who works for the foundation).
It also seems like it might be more expensive and/or complicated to lay cable overland for thousands of miles versus underwater for thousands of miles. Think about what moves on the sea floor. Now think about what moves around on earth's surface. Now think about getting a right-of-way across Asia and coordinating with all the governments and private landowners that you'd have to deal with. So I think it is probably easier just to drop a cable under the ocean, since it's going to be more protected from people and probably just simpler all around.
I understand your sentiment but just as there are different types of geeks there are different types of environmentalists. It's just like Christians/atheists/Republicans/Democrats: some take extreme positions in the name of their belief and are just stupid, but it's equally stupid to generalize their views to the larger population of those who nominally share their opinion.
Nope. I can only speak for myself, but I pay taxes because I would like government services (police protection, roads, legal framework for business, etc).
If the difference between a legitimate military campaign and terrorism is a plan, what does that make the US invasion of Iraq? What does that make the Hezbollah resistance in 2006, which many would claim to have been executed with a well-defined plan? Also, how would we know that those perpetrating this vandalism are at all associated with the Hamas leadership? How are we to know what plans Hamas has for defense of Gaza, given that no journalists have been allowed inside by Israel, which has explicitly (and quite understandably) stated they want to control the images coming out of Gaza?
Methinks your definitions are troublesome.
Another thing that makes defining terrorism troubling. A Hamas missle hit an empty Israeli school here a few days back. That was terrorism. Today, an Israeli bomb hit a Palestinian school, killing 30. We assume good faith for the Israelis, saying their action was a mistake or that the school was really a Hamas hideout, despite what the outcome of their action was (a bunch of dead children). My gut tells me it's a lot easier to miss a target with a homemade rocket than a smart bomb, so are we so quick (in this specific instance) to demonize Hamas while being lenient towards Israel? To me, both acts were acts of terrorism.
I'm not trying to argue with you, really. In fact, the only point I'm trying to make is calling some group "terrorists" makes a very complicated situation one with a moral "good" and "evil" side. The "good" can do no wrong, while the "evil" can do no right. That's no way to work towards a solution.
Disclaimer: I believe that the IDF has committed acts of terrorism in the name of national defense of equal or (more often) greater magnitude to those committed by Hamas in the name of nationalism, and I further believe that my point is backed up by the deathtoll on each side over the past ten years.
First, it's unlikely you're going to come up with a huge, novel idea in the course of one of your class projects, especially in the first few years of your career. Not impossible, but unlikely. If you do, and if it's an academic idea, and you know it's really big, then you probably should talk to your professors about it. A big academic idea means writing a paper, and you want the help of someone who knows that business. You'll co-author the paper with your professor, get a great reference and have publication to boot. Professors generally are happy to take on undergraduate research students, especially if they are smart enough to generate publishable research. Also, they can tell you if the field already explored your idea 30 years ago and found it to be less huge than expected (you'd be amazed at how much research has already taken place in CS).
If you come up with some kickass business idea, people generally aren't going to take it because they're not as excited as you. Take good precautions though when talking about it, of course, but recognize that at some point you're going to have to let people know because it's hard to go down that path alone. It's also good to have someone to bounce your ideas off of; We've all had a few "brilliant" ideas that we realized were crap as soon as we tried explaining them to someone.
Second, most people you will come into contact with on a daily basis aren't out to steal your ideas (as I mentioned above, others typically aren't as excited about them as you). As long as you're not an asshole, and you have healthy, friendly relationships with those around you, most folks you know in a university setting will be glad to help you turn your idea into reality. One piece of advice that I was given is to keep a notebook of your thoughts as they relate to your ideas. Keeping a notebook (a la Da Vinci, not a laptop) generally is a great idea, but it can be helpful in proving ownership of your idea and that it was developed off university/company time.
Slide 4 is probably related to Microsoft Comic Chat, an experimental IRC client that came out of Microsoft Research years ago (and incidentally the origin of the Comic Sans font). It basically took an IRC conversation and made it look like a comic strip, where each member of the conversation had a different character, and their words would appear as speech bubbles. You could also make your character have different expressions. All in all it was pretty cool and actually worked pretty well. It never really took off though because it accomplished all this by prepending metadata to your messages: if the people you were talking to were using MS Chat, they would see your character smile or frown or something; if they used any other client it'd just be a bunch of gibberish before your message.
There is something wrong in the world when a private company can't sell its printers to a private buyer simply because the seller is in the US and the buyer is in Iran. I understand the reason for sanctions (whether or not I agree with that reason), but I am pretty sure that some people's liberties are being infringed due to a political disagreement they have nothing to do with. Nothing new, I guess, for Iran or the US.
When I was younger my dad built a computer for me that ran great for about a year or so after he finished it. Then, slowly but surely I started getting BSOD's more and more often. I tried pretty much everything to resolve the issue, updated drivers, ran the machine in safe mode but still had the problem. I eventually got used to the computer just crashing on a fairly regular basis.
It wasn't until I tried to put Red Hat (pre-Fedora days) on it. Try as I may I couldn't get the installation to complete. I was about ready to give up and blame incompatible hardware when I decided to clean out the dust from the mainboard, including the memory module slots, with canned air. Lo and behold, I was able to complete installation and never had stability problems with that computer again.
I actually like being in school, and I'm going to graduate school next so I'm not in any rush. Also my scholarship provides for 8 semesters of funding so there is no financial incentive for me to leave just yet. Given the current state of the economy I think I've made a good decision; college is a good place to ride out a recession, I think.
I'm in a similar position to you, actually. For me, I realized that by working hard I could pretty much finish my degree requirements by the end of my third year of school (which I will do). So, that left me with two "open" semesters in my Senior year that I'm going to use to finish up general college requirements, take more advanced CS classes. While it seems like it's impossible to finish all of those requirements, it's actually not that difficult I think. The reason that this is important is that you probably shouldn't expect to get credit to transfer back for technical courses you do abroad and instead use it as an opportunity to fulfill those liberal arts requirements if you have any.
The next bit of advice I have is to talk with your professors in your department and ask for their recommendations. At my school, the director of undergraduate curricula is the one that was most helpful to me, so maybe you could try to talk to an equivalent at your school. He or she will not only be familiar with the undergraduate requirements for CS, they'll probably also be the one who will be able to approve or reject credit you receive abroad as it applies to filling your major requirements. Additionally, they will probably know about other students from your school who have studied abroad before.
Ok, to answer your question about actual programs abroad, here are some places. To be fair, in the end I decided (for the time being anyway) not to study abroad for personal reasons. Anyway, my school (UNC-Chapel Hill) has a study abroad program particularly for CS majors between us and UCL (University College of London). Oftentimes even if a study abroad program is not offered at your university, you can arrange to do a program through another university, so if you're interested in this particular one let me know and I can get you more information. Additionally, I was considering and know friends who have gone to National University of Singapore, which also has a strong CS college.
My bigger point is this: don't expect too much out of study abroad from an academic point of view. There's just so much complication between different teaching systems, credit transfers, and potentially different languages that you're better off approaching it as an opportunity to learn things completely different than your normal semester's fare in the CS dept. Good luck!
Yes, but paper production is also a very energy intensive process, and the byproducts of production are fairly polluting. Just because it is "renewable" doesn't mean using it can be done without limits. There is more to the equation than just "we can grow more of the primary raw material", there is an environmental, social, and economic balance that has to be considered.
My thoughts exactly. I'd imagine that if used in a controlled manner, the risk of damaging healthy cells is minimized. And, since the nanotubes here are being used to deliver medicine to cancer cells, the tubes ability to damage cell material probably doesn't matter that much.
Likewise, the last time I dealt with this was while I was in college in my OS class, which was yesterday (final exam in OS tomorrow, my time on/. is being productive!). But, according to what we've studied, the program never gets a physical address, ever, only virtual addresses which are translated by the MMU at runtime into physical frames, and that's still the way that modern OSes actually work. The page table keeps track of a "resident bit" to record whether the frame referred to by the page is actually present in memory or not. Actually, the way it works is the high order bits (page number) go into the page table, which returns another set of high order bits which correspond to a frame number. The low order bits are the frame offset, which come directly from your program. Each program has its own virtual address space, and the page table for each is stored in the program's context.
You mean to say "page file" rather than "virtual memory". Calling it "virtual memory" is something of a misnomer... virtual memory is a scheme for hiding the details of physical memory from user programs and providing protection between programs; it can also be used for implementing shared memory. Go read your textbook from your OS course for more info.
Assuming you mean "page file", the question is "will you ever use more than 1024gb worth of memory at any one time?" Chances are you won't, so you'd probably be fine, assuming no developers of any software you are running made bad assumptions about your configuration. And if you ever used more than 1024gb, you'd hit an out of memory exception when you went over, which the page file would prevent. Potentially, you'd have a lot of old "junk" in memory that you probably don't need to use that can be swapped out to disk.
You have to remember that if your machine is using 32 bit addresses, the virtual address space for each process is 4gb: conceivably, each process can address up to that amount of memory to hold its code, stack, and data (execution data). For the vast, vast majority of programs all of these are on the order of MB (even Firefox sometimes!), but theoretically it would be possible for all your processes to request 4gb of data.
You're exactly right. RAM fragmentation will not ever hurt performance in any appreciable way on a modern system using virtual memory.
In olden days, on systems with static memory allocation, fragmented memory would decrease your system's memory utilization by leaving chunks of "unused" memory between allocations. In turn, this would decrease the amount of data you could store in memory and thus increase your page fault frequency, which would cause a significant impact to system performance. However this isn't a real concern any more, thanks to dynamic memory allocation. Snake oil indeed; sounds like someone had made money on this concept years ago and is still trying to milk it for all it's worth.
I know it was a joke but actually, in an oversimplified sense, yes. A main point of virtual memory in its true sense is to abstract the limitations of your amount of physical memory away from user programs, and instead present them with an effectively limitless virtual address space with which to work with. When the program says, "read from memory address 0x(some huge number)", the OS/memory management unit will translate that address request from a virtual page address to a physical frame via the page table. If there is no frame in memory that contains the data pointed to by the requested address, that's when you have a page fault. Then the operating goes to disk and fetches the data you requested.
Your performance would be abysmally slow, and obviously probably wouldn't work at all with modern operating systems (just a theoretical point here!), but assuming a good implementation of virtual memory you should be able to run everything just fine. Of course, if you don't have enough disk space for your address space, you'll run into problems.:)
I'm not arguing that life is infinitely extendable, I'm just saying time is not a mechanism by which aging occurs. To say so misrepresents time: it is not a biological process. Whatever process occurs in time would be the mechanism by which aging occurs; in your terms, the way entropy manifests itself within our bodies.
Time is not a mechanism for aging. Our bodies do not undergo "time" and age as a result. Assuming these researchers are correct, our bodies undergo some process like the one discussed here, which causes our bodies to break down in one way or the other. Time does not do the breaking down. The breaking down happens in time.
Put another way, it's not the passage of time itself that causes us to age, it's something that occurs during that passage of time, such as the process we're talking about here.
Slashdot Mirror
It just worked.
On a side note, that was filmed in the Microsoft Research building, and many people there run OSX. Interestingly enough, you are allowed to use any platform you want as a Microsoft employee (I've even met Linux users who work there), but the Gates Foundation mandates you use only Microsoft products (source: friend who works for the foundation).
It also seems like it might be more expensive and/or complicated to lay cable overland for thousands of miles versus underwater for thousands of miles. Think about what moves on the sea floor. Now think about what moves around on earth's surface. Now think about getting a right-of-way across Asia and coordinating with all the governments and private landowners that you'd have to deal with. So I think it is probably easier just to drop a cable under the ocean, since it's going to be more protected from people and probably just simpler all around.
I understand your sentiment but just as there are different types of geeks there are different types of environmentalists. It's just like Christians/atheists/Republicans/Democrats: some take extreme positions in the name of their belief and are just stupid, but it's equally stupid to generalize their views to the larger population of those who nominally share their opinion.
3... 2... 1...
Nope. I can only speak for myself, but I pay taxes because I would like government services (police protection, roads, legal framework for business, etc).
Ding ding ding, we have a winner!
If the difference between a legitimate military campaign and terrorism is a plan, what does that make the US invasion of Iraq? What does that make the Hezbollah resistance in 2006, which many would claim to have been executed with a well-defined plan? Also, how would we know that those perpetrating this vandalism are at all associated with the Hamas leadership? How are we to know what plans Hamas has for defense of Gaza, given that no journalists have been allowed inside by Israel, which has explicitly (and quite understandably) stated they want to control the images coming out of Gaza?
Methinks your definitions are troublesome.
Another thing that makes defining terrorism troubling. A Hamas missle hit an empty Israeli school here a few days back. That was terrorism. Today, an Israeli bomb hit a Palestinian school, killing 30. We assume good faith for the Israelis, saying their action was a mistake or that the school was really a Hamas hideout, despite what the outcome of their action was (a bunch of dead children). My gut tells me it's a lot easier to miss a target with a homemade rocket than a smart bomb, so are we so quick (in this specific instance) to demonize Hamas while being lenient towards Israel? To me, both acts were acts of terrorism.
I'm not trying to argue with you, really. In fact, the only point I'm trying to make is calling some group "terrorists" makes a very complicated situation one with a moral "good" and "evil" side. The "good" can do no wrong, while the "evil" can do no right. That's no way to work towards a solution.
Disclaimer: I believe that the IDF has committed acts of terrorism in the name of national defense of equal or (more often) greater magnitude to those committed by Hamas in the name of nationalism, and I further believe that my point is backed up by the deathtoll on each side over the past ten years.
One less button.
First, it's unlikely you're going to come up with a huge, novel idea in the course of one of your class projects, especially in the first few years of your career. Not impossible, but unlikely. If you do, and if it's an academic idea, and you know it's really big, then you probably should talk to your professors about it. A big academic idea means writing a paper, and you want the help of someone who knows that business. You'll co-author the paper with your professor, get a great reference and have publication to boot. Professors generally are happy to take on undergraduate research students, especially if they are smart enough to generate publishable research. Also, they can tell you if the field already explored your idea 30 years ago and found it to be less huge than expected (you'd be amazed at how much research has already taken place in CS).
If you come up with some kickass business idea, people generally aren't going to take it because they're not as excited as you. Take good precautions though when talking about it, of course, but recognize that at some point you're going to have to let people know because it's hard to go down that path alone. It's also good to have someone to bounce your ideas off of; We've all had a few "brilliant" ideas that we realized were crap as soon as we tried explaining them to someone.
Second, most people you will come into contact with on a daily basis aren't out to steal your ideas (as I mentioned above, others typically aren't as excited about them as you). As long as you're not an asshole, and you have healthy, friendly relationships with those around you, most folks you know in a university setting will be glad to help you turn your idea into reality. One piece of advice that I was given is to keep a notebook of your thoughts as they relate to your ideas. Keeping a notebook (a la Da Vinci, not a laptop) generally is a great idea, but it can be helpful in proving ownership of your idea and that it was developed off university/company time.
I have a feeling that putting GM bacteria in people's mouths probably requires at least 5 years to get from research announcement to FDA approval.
Slide 4 is probably related to Microsoft Comic Chat, an experimental IRC client that came out of Microsoft Research years ago (and incidentally the origin of the Comic Sans font). It basically took an IRC conversation and made it look like a comic strip, where each member of the conversation had a different character, and their words would appear as speech bubbles. You could also make your character have different expressions. All in all it was pretty cool and actually worked pretty well. It never really took off though because it accomplished all this by prepending metadata to your messages: if the people you were talking to were using MS Chat, they would see your character smile or frown or something; if they used any other client it'd just be a bunch of gibberish before your message.
There is something wrong in the world when a private company can't sell its printers to a private buyer simply because the seller is in the US and the buyer is in Iran. I understand the reason for sanctions (whether or not I agree with that reason), but I am pretty sure that some people's liberties are being infringed due to a political disagreement they have nothing to do with. Nothing new, I guess, for Iran or the US.
It wasn't until I tried to put Red Hat (pre-Fedora days) on it. Try as I may I couldn't get the installation to complete. I was about ready to give up and blame incompatible hardware when I decided to clean out the dust from the mainboard, including the memory module slots, with canned air. Lo and behold, I was able to complete installation and never had stability problems with that computer again.
I actually like being in school, and I'm going to graduate school next so I'm not in any rush. Also my scholarship provides for 8 semesters of funding so there is no financial incentive for me to leave just yet. Given the current state of the economy I think I've made a good decision; college is a good place to ride out a recession, I think.
I'm in a similar position to you, actually. For me, I realized that by working hard I could pretty much finish my degree requirements by the end of my third year of school (which I will do). So, that left me with two "open" semesters in my Senior year that I'm going to use to finish up general college requirements, take more advanced CS classes. While it seems like it's impossible to finish all of those requirements, it's actually not that difficult I think. The reason that this is important is that you probably shouldn't expect to get credit to transfer back for technical courses you do abroad and instead use it as an opportunity to fulfill those liberal arts requirements if you have any.
The next bit of advice I have is to talk with your professors in your department and ask for their recommendations. At my school, the director of undergraduate curricula is the one that was most helpful to me, so maybe you could try to talk to an equivalent at your school. He or she will not only be familiar with the undergraduate requirements for CS, they'll probably also be the one who will be able to approve or reject credit you receive abroad as it applies to filling your major requirements. Additionally, they will probably know about other students from your school who have studied abroad before.
Ok, to answer your question about actual programs abroad, here are some places. To be fair, in the end I decided (for the time being anyway) not to study abroad for personal reasons. Anyway, my school (UNC-Chapel Hill) has a study abroad program particularly for CS majors between us and UCL (University College of London). Oftentimes even if a study abroad program is not offered at your university, you can arrange to do a program through another university, so if you're interested in this particular one let me know and I can get you more information. Additionally, I was considering and know friends who have gone to National University of Singapore, which also has a strong CS college.
My bigger point is this: don't expect too much out of study abroad from an academic point of view. There's just so much complication between different teaching systems, credit transfers, and potentially different languages that you're better off approaching it as an opportunity to learn things completely different than your normal semester's fare in the CS dept. Good luck!
Yes, but paper production is also a very energy intensive process, and the byproducts of production are fairly polluting. Just because it is "renewable" doesn't mean using it can be done without limits. There is more to the equation than just "we can grow more of the primary raw material", there is an environmental, social, and economic balance that has to be considered.
My thoughts exactly. I'd imagine that if used in a controlled manner, the risk of damaging healthy cells is minimized. And, since the nanotubes here are being used to deliver medicine to cancer cells, the tubes ability to damage cell material probably doesn't matter that much.
If you invoke Rule #34 on vaporware, does it come into existence?
Likewise, the last time I dealt with this was while I was in college in my OS class, which was yesterday (final exam in OS tomorrow, my time on /. is being productive!). But, according to what we've studied, the program never gets a physical address, ever, only virtual addresses which are translated by the MMU at runtime into physical frames, and that's still the way that modern OSes actually work. The page table keeps track of a "resident bit" to record whether the frame referred to by the page is actually present in memory or not. Actually, the way it works is the high order bits (page number) go into the page table, which returns another set of high order bits which correspond to a frame number. The low order bits are the frame offset, which come directly from your program. Each program has its own virtual address space, and the page table for each is stored in the program's context.
You mean to say "page file" rather than "virtual memory". Calling it "virtual memory" is something of a misnomer... virtual memory is a scheme for hiding the details of physical memory from user programs and providing protection between programs; it can also be used for implementing shared memory. Go read your textbook from your OS course for more info.
Assuming you mean "page file", the question is "will you ever use more than 1024gb worth of memory at any one time?" Chances are you won't, so you'd probably be fine, assuming no developers of any software you are running made bad assumptions about your configuration. And if you ever used more than 1024gb, you'd hit an out of memory exception when you went over, which the page file would prevent. Potentially, you'd have a lot of old "junk" in memory that you probably don't need to use that can be swapped out to disk.
You have to remember that if your machine is using 32 bit addresses, the virtual address space for each process is 4gb: conceivably, each process can address up to that amount of memory to hold its code, stack, and data (execution data). For the vast, vast majority of programs all of these are on the order of MB (even Firefox sometimes!), but theoretically it would be possible for all your processes to request 4gb of data.
Right, I was referring to external fragmentation (between pages) as opposed to internal fragmentation. You are quite right though.
You're exactly right. RAM fragmentation will not ever hurt performance in any appreciable way on a modern system using virtual memory.
In olden days, on systems with static memory allocation, fragmented memory would decrease your system's memory utilization by leaving chunks of "unused" memory between allocations. In turn, this would decrease the amount of data you could store in memory and thus increase your page fault frequency, which would cause a significant impact to system performance. However this isn't a real concern any more, thanks to dynamic memory allocation. Snake oil indeed; sounds like someone had made money on this concept years ago and is still trying to milk it for all it's worth.
I know it was a joke but actually, in an oversimplified sense, yes. A main point of virtual memory in its true sense is to abstract the limitations of your amount of physical memory away from user programs, and instead present them with an effectively limitless virtual address space with which to work with. When the program says, "read from memory address 0x(some huge number)", the OS/memory management unit will translate that address request from a virtual page address to a physical frame via the page table. If there is no frame in memory that contains the data pointed to by the requested address, that's when you have a page fault. Then the operating goes to disk and fetches the data you requested.
:)
Your performance would be abysmally slow, and obviously probably wouldn't work at all with modern operating systems (just a theoretical point here!), but assuming a good implementation of virtual memory you should be able to run everything just fine. Of course, if you don't have enough disk space for your address space, you'll run into problems.
I'm not arguing that life is infinitely extendable, I'm just saying time is not a mechanism by which aging occurs. To say so misrepresents time: it is not a biological process. Whatever process occurs in time would be the mechanism by which aging occurs; in your terms, the way entropy manifests itself within our bodies.
Time is not a mechanism for aging. Our bodies do not undergo "time" and age as a result. Assuming these researchers are correct, our bodies undergo some process like the one discussed here, which causes our bodies to break down in one way or the other. Time does not do the breaking down. The breaking down happens in time.
Put another way, it's not the passage of time itself that causes us to age, it's something that occurs during that passage of time, such as the process we're talking about here.