this is a clear case of criminal negligence. and i'm not talking about the teacher. i'm talking about the judge, the police, and the prosecutor who, either through malice or incompetence, tried to lock an innocent woman up for 40 years.
at the very least they should be fired from their posts. anyone with even the slightest shred of reason and experience using a computer could see how idiotic it is punish someone for browser pop-ups she had no control over. if anything, it should be the site owners who use pornographic pop-ups with indiscretion or install adware/malware on the computers of unsuspecting users who should have been put on trial.
if a teacher can be tried for unprofessional/disorderly conduct and lose her teaching license based on things which she had no reasonable control over, then those involved in the earlier case decision can certainly be fired for their actions which they had full conscious control over, and which have actually resulted in real harm--ending the career of an innocent school teacher and generally ruining her life.
the scary thing is, the state's attorney still thinks she should have been put away. and that guy is still the New London County state's attorney.
well, to be fair settling out of court is almost categorically cheaper than proceeding with the case. that is the whole purpose of an early settlement. petty semantics aside, he is absolutely correct.
though in this case i don't think Harmonix, EA, Viacom, etc. really care--or need to care--about making people "feel better" about buying from them. who needs good PR when you've sold over 4 million units, have already generated over half a billion dollars in global revenue, and are selling 1 million downloadable songs every 9 days.
i mean, $2 per song for tracks that you can only listen to in the game? most people obviously don't care about being ripped off. otherwise they would just demand that Harmonix allow users to load their own MP3s into the game rather than having to buy (or repurchase) overpriced locked-in tracks, and they definitely wouldn't be paying $60 for a "sequel" to a rhythm game.
in other words, Harmonix/EA/etc. being a dick and screwing over their customers isn't anything new. it didn't stop people from buying their products before, and it won't stop them in the future
while you're probably right in that this technology will be most useful by extracting the vast amounts of energy contained in the ocean (absorbed solar energy) it will likely be deployed in a lot of rivers as well. in fact, the video mentions that the pilot project is being built on the Detroit River. so it's not just coastal cities who are going to benefit from this technology.
i think it's interesting that this technology is expected to be much more cost-effective than conventional solar power. and the ability to operate efficiently in rivers too slow for hydroelectric dams is another plus. rather than simply being a low-impact replacement for dams, it's more likely that this technology will open up hydroelectric power in a lot of new places with slow-moving currents where hydroelectric dams can't be used.
to get back on topic, i'm rather disturbed that British ISPs would partner themselves with a company with a history of distributing spyware/malware and uses deceptive (and arguably illegal) tactics, such as using a rootkit, to get/keep their software installed on the computers of unsuspecting individuals.
i'm not from the U.K. so i don't know how much choice Brits have with regards to broadband access. if it's anything like the U.S. then BT subscribers probably won't be able to just switch to a different broadband provider and boycott BT's actions. broadband access, like most communications networks, tend to be natural monopolies because a network's usefulness is directly proportional to its size. having a bunch of small fragmented networks isn't very useful, whereas having a large nationwide network is.
it seems like the public has only two options here. they can either, lobby the government to establish regulations protecting the rights of consumers, or they should establish municipal WiFi/WiMax networks that each community can run themselves. obviously BT won't listen to their consumers, which is why they're silencing them to suppress criticism, and there doesn't seem to be any laws forbidding BT from pursuing this partnership. so establishing a municipal wireless network seems like the best way to protect consumer interests.
you can't dictate what a private corporation does, but you do have a voice in local government. therefore if members of the community don't like how their publicly-run broadband network is managed, they can change it; it's they're legal prerogative to do so.
also, the problem with Microsoft's bundling was that they were abusing their monopoly. they used the monopoly Windows held in the desktop OS market to gain an unfair monopoly in the browser market. this included integrating IE into Windows (making it impossible to uninstall) and forbidding OEMs from bundling competing browsers with their systems. this was a clear case of anticompetitive behavior.
there's nothing inherently wrong or illegal with bundling software with hardware. Nero does it, Apple does it, AOL does it, Microsoft certainly does it, and so do countless other companies. saying that Google is being just like MS by bundling their software is just demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the antitrust case against Microsoft.
well, i think that's one of the interesting things about social sciences. it's very difficult--nigh impossible in some cases--to accurately predict the behavior of a single individual. however, it is possible to predict the collective behavior of a large group of people.
this seems counter intuitive at first, but it's kinda like not being able to predict how a particular dice roll will land but still being able to predict the statistical average of 100 dice rolls.
the capriciousness of individuals eventually balances itself out if you use a large enough data set. likewise, fringe opinions also balance each other out when dealing with statistical averages.
lol. i'm hoping that post wasn't meant to be serious.
duh.
i guess they'll just have to work really hard to produce more than a few thousand chips, eh?
and your point is?
you've never been outside of the U.S. have you?
oh, what the hell am i doing...
sorry, i prefer to write in organized, coherent paragraphs rather than disjointed lists with no logical structure.
in any case, assuming you're right and no one cares about energy efficiency, people still care about performance. an energy-efficient system will run cooler, and thus also quieter than an inefficient system. additionally, the more energy-efficient a system is, the longer its battery life will be. so until we have nuclear-powered laptops that never need recharging, energy-efficiency will still be highly desirable--otherwise Intel & AMD would not have developed low-power mobile processors.
and you seem to be confused about what SSE and AltiVec/VMX are, and why they are advantageous. most commodity systems use general-purpose CPUs with a main scalar/SISD processor. but since the late 90's companies like Intel, AMD, Motorola, IBM, Apple, etc. have started adding SIMD/vector processors onto their CPUs to provide specialized instruction sets for handling things like multimedia, 3D modeling, scientific analysis, etc.
vector processors enable an otherwise general-purpose scalar CPU to process vectorized data sets used in the above-mentioned applications much more rapidly and efficiently than the scalar processor could. this results in higher performance at lower clock speeds and also better power consumption. but in the end, commodity CPUs are still general-purpose processors. there's only so much on-die integration of specialized instruction sets you can perform before it becomes uneconomical due to the huge level of complexity being added to the processor.
obviously it's also impractical to design a custom CPU for every application in the commodity computing market. therefore, you're never going to replace specialized GPUs and other coprocessors with just simple instruction set extensions. and in many ways specialized coprocessors are an evolutionary next-step to on-die vector processors like AltiVec & SSE. by offloading special-purpose vector operations to a separate coprocessor, you can develop more specialized instruction sets to process multimedia, 2D/3D graphics, financial analysis and other applications more efficiently without slowing down the decoding of more common instructions used by the main scalar processor.
oh, they must have used highly advanced software to detect the minute discrepancies between lighting angles. it must have taken a team of experts several weeks to uncover the fraud.
this seems like typical nationalistic BS, but it's really not any worse than the kind of stuff you see in magazines or the kind of audience manipulation TV networks like Fox and CNN do on a regular basis. i'd be more worried about Army psy-ops "interning" at CNN or NPR.
i'm just curious why VIA hasn't been a major contender in the growing netbook & low power desktop market. haven't low power processors always been their specialty?
i think it'd be hard for any independent manufacturer to compete against AMD & Intel in the high-end market where the duopoly is firmly entrenched. however, many consumers are beginning to realize that they really don't need the latest quad core processor just to check e-mail and surf the web. i expect the trend towards low power desktops & sub-laptops will continue to grow in coming years, especially as power-efficiency and portability start playing a greater role in people's purchasing decisions.
i mean, if AMD and Intel are both focusing all of their R&D resources on pumping out more processing power, then it makes much more sense for an independent manufacturer to focus on minimizing power consumption & heat like VIA is doing. designing purpose-driven PCs is another way of increasing efficiency and lowering cost & power-consumption. for instance, using specialized GPUs to handle things like 2D graphics (sub-pixel antialiasing, Lanczos resampling, bicubic interpolation, Bézier spline manipulation, high quality image blurring, etc.) you can build a relatively low-power system designed specifically for 2D graphic design.
most people usually only use their computers for a narrow range of applications. if i'm a graphic designer, i don't need a system that can play the latest games; and if i'm a musician or audio engineer, then i don't need a general-purpose PC that can do 2D/3D graphics. by focusing on specialized GPUs/sub-processors and purpose-driven designs rather than trying to out-compete AMD and Intel in high-power general-purpose CPUs, i think an independent manufacturer like VIA stands a good chance of grabbing a large slice of the consumer market.
exactly. and it should be noted that most of the antibiotic-resistant "super bugs" that we're starting to see today are due to the abuse of antibiotics. many doctors over-prescribe antibiotics just to placate their patients, so people end up taking antibiotics for flus & colds despite their being viral infections. antibiotics are also put into animal feed because it makes livestock grow much larger. even the use of antibacterial soap can cause bacteria to evolve resistance to certain types of antibiotics that work similarly to its antibacterial agent(s) (like Triclosan).
astronauts traveling to mars would actually be safer from multiresistant bacteria than someone on earth. there are no hospitals in space (or on mars) to serve as breeding grounds for super bugs. and without the abuse of antibiotics there's nothing to trigger the development of antibiotic resistance in any bacteria the crew might bring with them or encounter. in short, without the use of antibiotics, there's nothing to create antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.
Ice is a solid phase, usually crystalline, of a non-metallic substance that is liquid or gas at room temperature, such as ammonia ice or methane ice.
ice clearly isn't synonymous with solid. ice may be a solid, but not all solids are ice. one is a subset of the other. just like a whale is a cetacean, but it would be idiotic to say cetacean is synonymous with whales when not all cetaceans are whales.
like i said earlier, if you're going to refer to ice simply as solids, then how do you distinguish ices from all solids (which includes non-ices)?
the term ice only becomes imprecise when you start conflating it worth other words/meanings. that's why the article says water ice. how is that imprecise compared to just calling it "ice"? and how is equivocating "ice" with "solid" more precise when you're replacing a term with its proper superset?
no one is going to be sailing to Mars in a 15th century galleon or caravel. the reason our "New World" is Mars is because technology has advanced a fair bit since the 1400's.
our astronauts aren't going to be stricken by scurvy, nor are they going to contract polio, malaria, or other now preventable diseases. they also won't die form bacterial infections that killed millions of people before antibiotics were discovered. that means a small cut or cavity won't turn into sepsis or bacteremia and kill you.
astronauts are also not at risk of getting lost due to a lack of modern navigation technology. in fact, any trip to mars will likely be backed by billions of dollars of science/research, technology, and years of extensive preparation and planning. and any candidates for Mars exploration or colonization will be specially chosen for their educational and technical background and given additional training on top of that. so they're likely to fare a little better than the average 15th century explorer.
and even people who climb Mt. Everest bring their own oxygen, food & water. why would astronauts going to Mars need to worry about no air/food? if we were going to send anyone to colonize Mars they'd be living inside of a space habitat. they're not going to be dropped off on Mars butt naked without any supplies or shelter. in all likelihood by the time we send our first manned mission there'll already be some kind of habitation module, sustainable power plant, chemical oxygen generator, and usable water supply.
any astronaut going to Mars is going to have a much longer life expectancy than the average 15th century European, much less a 15th century explorer. aside from perhaps the psychological strain, going to Mars would be a cakewalk compared to traveling to the New World in the 1400's.
like you said, most ideas/applications/games don't go anywhere. therefore, it's best not to get ahead of yourself trying to make money off of a game that people may or may not want to play.
however, if you still want to sell the game, then just do a quick search for mobile games on the platform(s) you want to publish on. then just look up the publishers of the games you see and contact them. obviously the easier a publisher's games are to find, the better distribution and marketing they have. so just hit up the publishers with the most games that you come across. they'll let you know if your game is worth publishing.
but one of the greatest benefits of the internet/web has been the empowerment of independent musicians, writers, artists, and software developers. it's very cheap and easy to set up your own website and promote & distribute your game yourself without a publisher. for the majority of indie game developers it's probably a better idea to just give your game out for free to build up a user base and solicit PayPal donations on your homepage.
or you can always do the shareware thing--let people download a trial or limited/lite (perhaps single player) version of the game, and then once you get your game out there and establish that people actually want to play it, you can charge for a full or pro version. and once you've built up a fan base on your own, you'll have more leverage to negotiate a distribution deal with a publisher.
other options are Android Market and Apple's App Store. but unless your game is extremely kick ass and of high quality, open sourcing & self-publishing it is probably the best way to go.
you need to work on your reading comprehension skills.
DNSSEC exists plain and simple. it's already been deployed for a lot of domains and root nameservers. just because there are difficulties hampering its widespread adoption doesn't mean it doesn't exist. that's like saying IPv6 doesn't exist because it's still suffering from a lack of widespread adoption.
none of the factors preventing more widespread deployment are problems that need "solving." in fact, they're more social/political problems than they are technical problems. so the "solution" to these problems is simply to persuade/pressure/coerce DNS servers to adopt DNSSEC, which is what IETF is debating about.
backward-compatibility may be difficult to maintain, but this is a transitional problem, and it's not a real technical barrier to adoption at this point. BIND 9.3 (several older versions are compatible as well) officially supports DNSSEC, so does NSD, and Nominum's ANS and CNS. the fact of the matter is, there are tons of domains already using DNSSEC without issue.
the zone enumeration issue has already been solved with NSEC3 (RFC 5155) released in March--which you'd already know if you'd read the rest of that Wiki article.
this is a logistical problem that every new technology/protocol/standard faces. the main issue here is the last-mover advantage. nobody wants to be the first to adopt a new standard when there's no financial incentive to do so. but somebody has to go first. and at this point there is already a wide variety of software, prototype systems & tools available for implementing DNSSEC with little to no risk involved.
this is purely a political issue, and it has more to do with the U.S.'s monopolistic control over the DNS system than DNSSEC. perhaps if ICANN acted more impartially instead of getting in bed with Verisign and other commercial corporations we wouldn't have political BS hindering technological progress. in any case, this is an ICANN problem and could be solved by organizational reforms to make ICANN operate with more transparency and give other nations a voice in domain name management.
the perception of DNSSEC being too complex or difficult to adopt is just that--a problem with public perception. IETF is working on resolving this problem through education and training, which are on their deployment road map. there's a lot of good free resources out there to help ease others through this transitions and dispel false perceptions.
your right, the Linpack benchmarks are indeed also measured in FLOPS, and that's what the TOP500 rankings are based on. however, when the Dawning is advertised as being capable of 180 TFLOPS or 160 TFLOPS--depending on who you ask--they're probably not referring to the Linpack benchmarks, which it only peaks at ~11.264 TFLOPS.
(1) Supports up to 32 cores.* (2) Supports up to 64 cores.* (3) Supports up to 64 cores.**
when Microsoft says their next Windows Server release, Windows Server 2008 R2 (server variant of Windows 7), will support 256 processors, they mean "logical processors," which they define as # of physical CPUs * # of cores per CPU * # of active threads per core.
so Windows Server 2008 current supports 64 logical processors, but that's only 8 CPUs * 4 cores * 2 threads. however, Windows Server 2008 R2 will in fact support 64 physical processors when it comes out.
because Firefox isn't annoying. Firefox doesn't have a single "search engine provider." it knows that people often use more than one search engine. and if i want to change my homepage i can just go to Tools->Options.
if i want to add/edit my search tools i can go to "Manage Search Engines." or i can simply right click on the search box on any site i want and click "Add a Keyword for this Search" to add a search keyword. it's less intrusive and more convenient than being forced to go through some stupid setup wizard to pick a "search engine provider" that my browser will automatically use every time.
when i open a browser, it's because i need to look for information or want to browse a certain site. if i want to change my browser preferences, i will go to the options dialog. it's incredibly annoying to have an unsolicited setup wizard shoved in my face. that's why i appreciate Firefox allowing me to surf the web unmolested. and instead of locking the browser into a single "search engine provider," Mozilla gives users a search tool that you can use if you want, or completely ignore and just search the web traditionally via search boxes on different sites.
besides, any time you install Firefox on a Windows system it'll ask you the first time you start the browser whether or not you want to import your IE browser preferences. when has IE ever asked if you wanted to import your browser preferences from Firefox?
just because it never caught on doesn't mean it's a bad concept or useless. VRML has been succeeded by X3D, which continues to be developed. but without mainstream adoption by popular browsers we'll never know if it's useful or not.
web technologies in particular need to be implemented by multiple applications and gain universal support before they're of any use to developers. that's why while SVG and VML are clearly useful standards, they're not being used in many applications because there still isn't universal support for these standards.
there are plenty of useful web applications for interactive 3D vector graphics. data visualization, VR environments, and 3D modeling are the most obvious uses. right now the only means of implementing these features is through Java applets, processing, and Flash, all of which require installing 3rd-party plugins. a standardized 3D vector format/API natively supported by all popular browsers would open the door to a whole new range of web applications and create new possibilities for web interfaces.
just like AJAX changed the look and feel of web applications, making them more responsive and more similar to desktop applications, so too would the widespread adoption of X3D.
Slashdot Mirror
this is a clear case of criminal negligence. and i'm not talking about the teacher. i'm talking about the judge, the police, and the prosecutor who, either through malice or incompetence, tried to lock an innocent woman up for 40 years.
at the very least they should be fired from their posts. anyone with even the slightest shred of reason and experience using a computer could see how idiotic it is punish someone for browser pop-ups she had no control over. if anything, it should be the site owners who use pornographic pop-ups with indiscretion or install adware/malware on the computers of unsuspecting users who should have been put on trial.
if a teacher can be tried for unprofessional/disorderly conduct and lose her teaching license based on things which she had no reasonable control over, then those involved in the earlier case decision can certainly be fired for their actions which they had full conscious control over, and which have actually resulted in real harm--ending the career of an innocent school teacher and generally ruining her life.
the scary thing is, the state's attorney still thinks she should have been put away. and that guy is still the New London County state's attorney.
um, i was agreeing with you. i was saying that the GGP doesn't understand why the antitrust case was filed against MS.
well, to be fair settling out of court is almost categorically cheaper than proceeding with the case. that is the whole purpose of an early settlement. petty semantics aside, he is absolutely correct.
though in this case i don't think Harmonix, EA, Viacom, etc. really care--or need to care--about making people "feel better" about buying from them. who needs good PR when you've sold over 4 million units, have already generated over half a billion dollars in global revenue, and are selling 1 million downloadable songs every 9 days.
i mean, $2 per song for tracks that you can only listen to in the game? most people obviously don't care about being ripped off. otherwise they would just demand that Harmonix allow users to load their own MP3s into the game rather than having to buy (or repurchase) overpriced locked-in tracks, and they definitely wouldn't be paying $60 for a "sequel" to a rhythm game.
in other words, Harmonix/EA/etc. being a dick and screwing over their customers isn't anything new. it didn't stop people from buying their products before, and it won't stop them in the future
while you're probably right in that this technology will be most useful by extracting the vast amounts of energy contained in the ocean (absorbed solar energy) it will likely be deployed in a lot of rivers as well. in fact, the video mentions that the pilot project is being built on the Detroit River. so it's not just coastal cities who are going to benefit from this technology.
i think it's interesting that this technology is expected to be much more cost-effective than conventional solar power. and the ability to operate efficiently in rivers too slow for hydroelectric dams is another plus. rather than simply being a low-impact replacement for dams, it's more likely that this technology will open up hydroelectric power in a lot of new places with slow-moving currents where hydroelectric dams can't be used.
--and then it works really great! right?
so simply buy a used Ford vehicle whose warranty has already run out. problem solved!
"Another question"
to get back on topic, i'm rather disturbed that British ISPs would partner themselves with a company with a history of distributing spyware/malware and uses deceptive (and arguably illegal) tactics, such as using a rootkit, to get/keep their software installed on the computers of unsuspecting individuals.
i'm not from the U.K. so i don't know how much choice Brits have with regards to broadband access. if it's anything like the U.S. then BT subscribers probably won't be able to just switch to a different broadband provider and boycott BT's actions. broadband access, like most communications networks, tend to be natural monopolies because a network's usefulness is directly proportional to its size. having a bunch of small fragmented networks isn't very useful, whereas having a large nationwide network is.
it seems like the public has only two options here. they can either, lobby the government to establish regulations protecting the rights of consumers, or they should establish municipal WiFi/WiMax networks that each community can run themselves. obviously BT won't listen to their consumers, which is why they're silencing them to suppress criticism, and there doesn't seem to be any laws forbidding BT from pursuing this partnership. so establishing a municipal wireless network seems like the best way to protect consumer interests.
you can't dictate what a private corporation does, but you do have a voice in local government. therefore if members of the community don't like how their publicly-run broadband network is managed, they can change it; it's they're legal prerogative to do so.
also, the problem with Microsoft's bundling was that they were abusing their monopoly. they used the monopoly Windows held in the desktop OS market to gain an unfair monopoly in the browser market. this included integrating IE into Windows (making it impossible to uninstall) and forbidding OEMs from bundling competing browsers with their systems. this was a clear case of anticompetitive behavior.
there's nothing inherently wrong or illegal with bundling software with hardware. Nero does it, Apple does it, AOL does it, Microsoft certainly does it, and so do countless other companies. saying that Google is being just like MS by bundling their software is just demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the antitrust case against Microsoft.
well, i think that's one of the interesting things about social sciences. it's very difficult--nigh impossible in some cases--to accurately predict the behavior of a single individual. however, it is possible to predict the collective behavior of a large group of people.
this seems counter intuitive at first, but it's kinda like not being able to predict how a particular dice roll will land but still being able to predict the statistical average of 100 dice rolls.
the capriciousness of individuals eventually balances itself out if you use a large enough data set. likewise, fringe opinions also balance each other out when dealing with statistical averages.
lol. i'm hoping that post wasn't meant to be serious.
sorry, i prefer to write in organized, coherent paragraphs rather than disjointed lists with no logical structure.
in any case, assuming you're right and no one cares about energy efficiency, people still care about performance. an energy-efficient system will run cooler, and thus also quieter than an inefficient system. additionally, the more energy-efficient a system is, the longer its battery life will be. so until we have nuclear-powered laptops that never need recharging, energy-efficiency will still be highly desirable--otherwise Intel & AMD would not have developed low-power mobile processors.
and you seem to be confused about what SSE and AltiVec/VMX are, and why they are advantageous. most commodity systems use general-purpose CPUs with a main scalar/SISD processor. but since the late 90's companies like Intel, AMD, Motorola, IBM, Apple, etc. have started adding SIMD/vector processors onto their CPUs to provide specialized instruction sets for handling things like multimedia, 3D modeling, scientific analysis, etc.
vector processors enable an otherwise general-purpose scalar CPU to process vectorized data sets used in the above-mentioned applications much more rapidly and efficiently than the scalar processor could. this results in higher performance at lower clock speeds and also better power consumption. but in the end, commodity CPUs are still general-purpose processors. there's only so much on-die integration of specialized instruction sets you can perform before it becomes uneconomical due to the huge level of complexity being added to the processor.
obviously it's also impractical to design a custom CPU for every application in the commodity computing market. therefore, you're never going to replace specialized GPUs and other coprocessors with just simple instruction set extensions. and in many ways specialized coprocessors are an evolutionary next-step to on-die vector processors like AltiVec & SSE. by offloading special-purpose vector operations to a separate coprocessor, you can develop more specialized instruction sets to process multimedia, 2D/3D graphics, financial analysis and other applications more efficiently without slowing down the decoding of more common instructions used by the main scalar processor.
and getting fur everywhere, especially on the clothes of the one guy in the department who's allergic to cats.
oh, they must have used highly advanced software to detect the minute discrepancies between lighting angles. it must have taken a team of experts several weeks to uncover the fraud.
this seems like typical nationalistic BS, but it's really not any worse than the kind of stuff you see in magazines or the kind of audience manipulation TV networks like Fox and CNN do on a regular basis. i'd be more worried about Army psy-ops "interning" at CNN or NPR.
i'm just curious why VIA hasn't been a major contender in the growing netbook & low power desktop market. haven't low power processors always been their specialty?
i think it'd be hard for any independent manufacturer to compete against AMD & Intel in the high-end market where the duopoly is firmly entrenched. however, many consumers are beginning to realize that they really don't need the latest quad core processor just to check e-mail and surf the web. i expect the trend towards low power desktops & sub-laptops will continue to grow in coming years, especially as power-efficiency and portability start playing a greater role in people's purchasing decisions.
i mean, if AMD and Intel are both focusing all of their R&D resources on pumping out more processing power, then it makes much more sense for an independent manufacturer to focus on minimizing power consumption & heat like VIA is doing. designing purpose-driven PCs is another way of increasing efficiency and lowering cost & power-consumption. for instance, using specialized GPUs to handle things like 2D graphics (sub-pixel antialiasing, Lanczos resampling, bicubic interpolation, Bézier spline manipulation, high quality image blurring, etc.) you can build a relatively low-power system designed specifically for 2D graphic design.
most people usually only use their computers for a narrow range of applications. if i'm a graphic designer, i don't need a system that can play the latest games; and if i'm a musician or audio engineer, then i don't need a general-purpose PC that can do 2D/3D graphics. by focusing on specialized GPUs/sub-processors and purpose-driven designs rather than trying to out-compete AMD and Intel in high-power general-purpose CPUs, i think an independent manufacturer like VIA stands a good chance of grabbing a large slice of the consumer market.
exactly. and it should be noted that most of the antibiotic-resistant "super bugs" that we're starting to see today are due to the abuse of antibiotics. many doctors over-prescribe antibiotics just to placate their patients, so people end up taking antibiotics for flus & colds despite their being viral infections. antibiotics are also put into animal feed because it makes livestock grow much larger. even the use of antibacterial soap can cause bacteria to evolve resistance to certain types of antibiotics that work similarly to its antibacterial agent(s) (like Triclosan).
astronauts traveling to mars would actually be safer from multiresistant bacteria than someone on earth. there are no hospitals in space (or on mars) to serve as breeding grounds for super bugs. and without the abuse of antibiotics there's nothing to trigger the development of antibiotic resistance in any bacteria the crew might bring with them or encounter. in short, without the use of antibiotics, there's nothing to create antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.
from Wikipedia:
ice clearly isn't synonymous with solid. ice may be a solid, but not all solids are ice. one is a subset of the other. just like a whale is a cetacean, but it would be idiotic to say cetacean is synonymous with whales when not all cetaceans are whales.
like i said earlier, if you're going to refer to ice simply as solids, then how do you distinguish ices from all solids (which includes non-ices)?
the term ice only becomes imprecise when you start conflating it worth other words/meanings. that's why the article says water ice. how is that imprecise compared to just calling it "ice"? and how is equivocating "ice" with "solid" more precise when you're replacing a term with its proper superset?
no one is going to be sailing to Mars in a 15th century galleon or caravel. the reason our "New World" is Mars is because technology has advanced a fair bit since the 1400's.
our astronauts aren't going to be stricken by scurvy, nor are they going to contract polio, malaria, or other now preventable diseases. they also won't die form bacterial infections that killed millions of people before antibiotics were discovered. that means a small cut or cavity won't turn into sepsis or bacteremia and kill you.
astronauts are also not at risk of getting lost due to a lack of modern navigation technology. in fact, any trip to mars will likely be backed by billions of dollars of science/research, technology, and years of extensive preparation and planning. and any candidates for Mars exploration or colonization will be specially chosen for their educational and technical background and given additional training on top of that. so they're likely to fare a little better than the average 15th century explorer.
and even people who climb Mt. Everest bring their own oxygen, food & water. why would astronauts going to Mars need to worry about no air/food? if we were going to send anyone to colonize Mars they'd be living inside of a space habitat. they're not going to be dropped off on Mars butt naked without any supplies or shelter. in all likelihood by the time we send our first manned mission there'll already be some kind of habitation module, sustainable power plant, chemical oxygen generator, and usable water supply.
any astronaut going to Mars is going to have a much longer life expectancy than the average 15th century European, much less a 15th century explorer. aside from perhaps the psychological strain, going to Mars would be a cakewalk compared to traveling to the New World in the 1400's.
then what are you going to call solids?
you're just digging a deeper and deeper nomenclatural hole by using imprecise (and in this case outright incorrect) terminology.
like you said, most ideas/applications/games don't go anywhere. therefore, it's best not to get ahead of yourself trying to make money off of a game that people may or may not want to play.
however, if you still want to sell the game, then just do a quick search for mobile games on the platform(s) you want to publish on. then just look up the publishers of the games you see and contact them. obviously the easier a publisher's games are to find, the better distribution and marketing they have. so just hit up the publishers with the most games that you come across. they'll let you know if your game is worth publishing.
but one of the greatest benefits of the internet/web has been the empowerment of independent musicians, writers, artists, and software developers. it's very cheap and easy to set up your own website and promote & distribute your game yourself without a publisher. for the majority of indie game developers it's probably a better idea to just give your game out for free to build up a user base and solicit PayPal donations on your homepage.
or you can always do the shareware thing--let people download a trial or limited/lite (perhaps single player) version of the game, and then once you get your game out there and establish that people actually want to play it, you can charge for a full or pro version. and once you've built up a fan base on your own, you'll have more leverage to negotiate a distribution deal with a publisher.
other options are Android Market and Apple's App Store. but unless your game is extremely kick ass and of high quality, open sourcing & self-publishing it is probably the best way to go.
because scientists don't like to use vague and imprecise language.
if "ice" means "water ice," then what do you say when you just want to refer to ice of any kind?
you need to work on your reading comprehension skills.
DNSSEC exists plain and simple. it's already been deployed for a lot of domains and root nameservers. just because there are difficulties hampering its widespread adoption doesn't mean it doesn't exist. that's like saying IPv6 doesn't exist because it's still suffering from a lack of widespread adoption.
none of the factors preventing more widespread deployment are problems that need "solving." in fact, they're more social/political problems than they are technical problems. so the "solution" to these problems is simply to persuade/pressure/coerce DNS servers to adopt DNSSEC, which is what IETF is debating about.
or Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composites, who in turn based their design off of the Soviet Myasishchev 3M-2.
why can't we just combine Hendrix's DNA with the Mammoth's?
your right, the Linpack benchmarks are indeed also measured in FLOPS, and that's what the TOP500 rankings are based on. however, when the Dawning is advertised as being capable of 180 TFLOPS or 160 TFLOPS--depending on who you ask--they're probably not referring to the Linpack benchmarks, which it only peaks at ~11.264 TFLOPS.
i'm pretty sure those are the number of cores:
when Microsoft says their next Windows Server release, Windows Server 2008 R2 (server variant of Windows 7), will support 256 processors, they mean "logical processors," which they define as # of physical CPUs * # of cores per CPU * # of active threads per core.
so Windows Server 2008 current supports 64 logical processors, but that's only 8 CPUs * 4 cores * 2 threads. however, Windows Server 2008 R2 will in fact support 64 physical processors when it comes out.
because Firefox isn't annoying. Firefox doesn't have a single "search engine provider." it knows that people often use more than one search engine. and if i want to change my homepage i can just go to Tools->Options.
if i want to add/edit my search tools i can go to "Manage Search Engines." or i can simply right click on the search box on any site i want and click "Add a Keyword for this Search" to add a search keyword. it's less intrusive and more convenient than being forced to go through some stupid setup wizard to pick a "search engine provider" that my browser will automatically use every time.
when i open a browser, it's because i need to look for information or want to browse a certain site. if i want to change my browser preferences, i will go to the options dialog. it's incredibly annoying to have an unsolicited setup wizard shoved in my face. that's why i appreciate Firefox allowing me to surf the web unmolested. and instead of locking the browser into a single "search engine provider," Mozilla gives users a search tool that you can use if you want, or completely ignore and just search the web traditionally via search boxes on different sites.
besides, any time you install Firefox on a Windows system it'll ask you the first time you start the browser whether or not you want to import your IE browser preferences. when has IE ever asked if you wanted to import your browser preferences from Firefox?
just because it never caught on doesn't mean it's a bad concept or useless. VRML has been succeeded by X3D, which continues to be developed. but without mainstream adoption by popular browsers we'll never know if it's useful or not.
web technologies in particular need to be implemented by multiple applications and gain universal support before they're of any use to developers. that's why while SVG and VML are clearly useful standards, they're not being used in many applications because there still isn't universal support for these standards.
there are plenty of useful web applications for interactive 3D vector graphics. data visualization, VR environments, and 3D modeling are the most obvious uses. right now the only means of implementing these features is through Java applets, processing, and Flash, all of which require installing 3rd-party plugins. a standardized 3D vector format/API natively supported by all popular browsers would open the door to a whole new range of web applications and create new possibilities for web interfaces.
just like AJAX changed the look and feel of web applications, making them more responsive and more similar to desktop applications, so too would the widespread adoption of X3D.