So, did ScuttleMonkey not notice that the submitter's name was PlayfullyClever backwards? The one whose website says that the vast majority of/. posts are "blatantly plagiarized"? Although the news seems real enough to me, the submitter's name and website raised some pretty big alarm bells, especially since their site now says:
"okay, so we are going to win slashdot again, this time with a different game plan, keep your eye out for our new name.. it is VERY playfully clever."
Hmm...
As I said, the news seems real enough, but the submitter is a fake.
Sorry, 1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm? That makes no sense whatsoever. A bit smaller, and almost the same shape, as a sugar cube? Even at the Register, they say it's 10 x 8 x 8cm, which puts it at a very large cube. I realized that they probably meant 0.8cm instead of 8, but then their numbers would be 10 x 0.8 x 0.8cm, a long rod.
What you say is true, if the only improvement of AMD64 is 64-bit support. However, AMD64 also doubles the number of general-purpose and XMM (for SSE, SSE2) registers to 16 of each. This will make many programs run faster, as having 8 general-purpose registers is just not enough. Far too much time is given to swapping data into and out of registers on x86. The additional registers is really what I like about AMD64. I couldn't care less about 64bit for now.
Although I will agree with the moderators that this is funny, I think I should do a bit of nit-picking.
An attowatt is one-quintillionth of a watt (not one quintillion watts) Such a laser would be utterly useless for pretty much everything. See this metric conversion guide. A 50-yottawatt laser would be more like what you were thinking of (plus it sounds so good... yottawatt. Wow.)
But really, the post was funny anyway. This is just FYI.
I especially liked the description of the large deep-sea crab:
In low light levels, red looks black, so it would blend in well in the darkness.
In other news, scientists have discovered that, with low enough light levels, green, blue, pink, white, and mauve all look black! The scientists involved are currently waiting for a government grant to test such properties on the elusive plaid.
My dad works at SAIC, and he's had the exact same problem (if you can call it that). For the second half of 2002, he essentially didn't have a job. He came in every Friday to check his messages, but that was it. He didn't lose his job because he's extremely good at a very specialized subject. Of course, now he is working overtime on 3 projects that landed on his desk a week apart, but for much of last year he was employed by SAIC on paper only.
From the article: He created a special arm of SAIC called Bull Inc. that effectively acts as a trading floor for the stock, setting a price for the shares based on SAIC's performance and that of peer companies.
It's kind of interesting when people say that SAIC stock is based on peer companies, earnings, and things like that. My dad works for SAIC, and he showed me the formula they use:
(a_bunch_of_really_complicated_math) * K
The bunch_of_math part is what uses the other companies' performance, and most people don't notice the K at the end. K is given some important sounding name, but it really boils down to "whatever we want to multiply everything by." Kind of a dirty way of hiding the fact that they set the stock price to whatever they want.
It's an interesting company, and I like their employee-owned thinking, but this always makes me laugh.
Well, first off I'll say that I agree that we need units on the memory latency. If they are in a unit of time (microseconds or something) then they really show what can be done with an onboard memory controller.
Well, the memory test was done in CacheMem, which gives 'cycles' as the latency unit. I bet that's what the review used. My P4 came up a bit less than 300 cycles, which is in line with their 260.
I agree that an improvement could be made. No warning was given, I just noticed that under the line where it says I posted a reply, it said "undoing moderation to comment #123456" (what really bugs me is that it also undid 2 other moderations that I had made in that story). Oh well. There's more to life than Slashdot, right? Right?
Oops. I forgot to post anonymously;/. undid my moderation. Just pretend that my comment never existed. Moderators: don't bother with either of my comments here.
Had to mod this down... It really is funny, but I don't think it should take up space with the answerable questions that are sent. (That is, of course, unless he really can read it, and it wasn't meant to be funny.) Others have suggested that comments obviously intended as 'funny' should not be sent in the interview (as I remember the Kevin Mitnik "What's my PayPal account password?") but I don't believe it has been instituted yet.
Slightly OT, but about your parenthetical statement: TFTs are the name for a specific type of LCD screen, also known as active-matrix screens. They are more expensive than passive-matrix displays, but they are generally regarded as bieng much better.
So, TFT is a more specific name, but LCD would be more accurate. See the webopedia for their definition of TFT.
When I clicked on your link, I got a page (entitled "Ook!") that said: Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled.
I don't know if it's old news that Bugzilla is actively combatting the Slashdot Effect, but I find it kind of amusing/interesting/alarming that it doesn't accept Slashdot referers. Imagine if other sites start doing the same! And just so you know, the parent posted a legit URL, but Bugzilla kicked it out.
BTW: you can just copy and paste the URL http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72540 into your browser to get the page c13v3rm0nk3y was talking about, or search for bug #72540.
In fact, in the powerbook spec sheet, it says: Expansion
One 400-Mbps FireWire (IEEE 1394) port (9)
Two 12-Mbps USB ports
One PC Card/CardBus slot supporting one Type I or Type II card
I suppose I should have made that clear. I completely agree with you that those who are too lazy to check the facts are not worth paying attention to. Many disbelievers in moon-landing/evolution/round-earth do in fact fall into this category. However, to say that they fall into the category, without hearing arguments from every one of them, is a bit presumptuous.
It is extremely important to keep an open mind towards people, especially when they take an extremely unpopular stance. Otherwise, you could overlook an actual valid argument from an informed disbeliever.
Oh, and I found an interesting dilemma for current evolutionary ideas here. I think it's a religious page, but if you ignore the evolution-flaming, it brings up an obvious need for further study.
After doing some research, I realized that I suffered a huge brain-fart. The textbook said they took off from the far side of the Earth, not landed on the far side of the moon.
(Oh, and that's the far side of the Earth from the moon's point of view.)
It is too bad one of the astronauts did not trudge a gigantic NASA WAS HERE into the moon dust so that the image could be seen from a large telescope. That should silence the idiots.
I think that all the moon landings were on the far side, so that wouldn't do much good. Except, of course, if they were to go to the far side of the moon to see the sign. Then that would prove NASA's right, and we could just leave them there! </humor>
Anyone care to correct me on the far-side thing? I never really trusted the textbook I got that out of.
On another note it always amazes me that a significant segment of a human population will believe the unbelievable and doubt the obvious.
But... isn't this a good thing? If everyone believed what was obvious, many scientific advances would never have come about (or at least be accepted) It's really the people who ask the questions about the accepted world that come up with the most astonishing advances. Remember Galileo, who flew in the face the religious community by thinking that the Earth revolved around the Sun? He actually came up with a big batch o' evidence, and science flourished.
I will grant you that the moon-landing disbelievers have very little to do with the interest of science, but give them a chance and they might actually prove something.
This means that if there are people who want to deny everything that NASA is trying to tell them, then all the more power to them! If they can come up with the evidence (and they DO have some evidence, BTW) then they have the edge on all the people who follow blind faith.
Now, let me say that I believe NASA when they say they landed on the moon, simply because there is really no reason not to, but if someone is willing to stand up and say I'm wrong, I am more than willing to listen to them. Bieng closed-minded about peole who disagree with you is generally a foolish act, and I think the world would be for the better if everyone remembered that.
OK guys, this might be hard to follow, but try to stick with it:
White light does not exist. What we call "white" is just a color that seems to excite all your eye's receptors just about evenly. The fact that white light doesn't exist is the reason for the color "temperature" and "white points" you may have encountered if you calibrate your monitor.
In your post, you refer to a "true white" and I can assure you that there is no such thing. Our brains will actually filter any prevailing color out of what it sees and just call the result "white." If you've ever worn colored sunglasses you know that after a while, you just don't notice the color. Everything looks normal!
Our eyes, however, don't do the same to black. If light is coming off an object, then it's not black. This is why you need a K in CMYK: the C+M+Y just reflects far too much light to be called black.
This means that there is no need for a W in RGBW, since your eye will just accept any "white-ish" color to be "white" as long as it is present in enough of what you see.
I don't know if I explained myself clearly enough to make any sense, but I spent the past hour trying to get the wording right, and I'm not going to spend any more.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, 1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm? That makes no sense whatsoever. A bit smaller, and almost the same shape, as a sugar cube?
Even at the Register, they say it's 10 x 8 x 8cm, which puts it at a very large cube. I realized that they probably meant 0.8cm instead of 8, but then their numbers would be 10 x 0.8 x 0.8cm, a long rod.
The number is most likely 10 x 10 x 0.8cm.
I read in "Maximum PC" that HL2 was designed to run at a decent framerate on a DirectX 6 card.
This page shows what's turned off for various cards. Apparently Valve went out of their way to make a playable game on as many cards as possible.
What you say is true, if the only improvement of AMD64 is 64-bit support. However, AMD64 also doubles the number of general-purpose and XMM (for SSE, SSE2) registers to 16 of each. This will make many programs run faster, as having 8 general-purpose registers is just not enough. Far too much time is given to swapping data into and out of registers on x86.
The additional registers is really what I like about AMD64. I couldn't care less about 64bit for now.
Although I will agree with the moderators that this is funny, I think I should do a bit of nit-picking.
An attowatt is one-quintillionth of a watt (not one quintillion watts) Such a laser would be utterly useless for pretty much everything. See this metric conversion guide. A 50-yottawatt laser would be more like what you were thinking of (plus it sounds so good... yottawatt. Wow.)
But really, the post was funny anyway. This is just FYI.
In other news, scientists have discovered that, with low enough light levels, green, blue, pink, white, and mauve all look black! The scientists involved are currently waiting for a government grant to test such properties on the elusive plaid.
My dad works at SAIC, and he's had the exact same problem (if you can call it that). For the second half of 2002, he essentially didn't have a job. He came in every Friday to check his messages, but that was it. He didn't lose his job because he's extremely good at a very specialized subject.
Of course, now he is working overtime on 3 projects that landed on his desk a week apart, but for much of last year he was employed by SAIC on paper only.
From the article:
He created a special arm of SAIC called Bull Inc. that effectively acts as a trading floor for the stock, setting a price for the shares based on SAIC's performance and that of peer companies.
It's kind of interesting when people say that SAIC stock is based on peer companies, earnings, and things like that. My dad works for SAIC, and he showed me the formula they use:
(a_bunch_of_really_complicated_math) * K
The bunch_of_math part is what uses the other companies' performance, and most people don't notice the K at the end. K is given some important sounding name, but it really boils down to "whatever we want to multiply everything by." Kind of a dirty way of hiding the fact that they set the stock price to whatever they want.
It's an interesting company, and I like their employee-owned thinking, but this always makes me laugh.
Well, first off I'll say that I agree that we need units on the memory latency. If they are in a unit of time (microseconds or something) then they really show what can be done with an onboard memory controller.
Well, the memory test was done in CacheMem, which gives 'cycles' as the latency unit. I bet that's what the review used. My P4 came up a bit less than 300 cycles, which is in line with their 260.
I agree that an improvement could be made. No warning was given, I just noticed that under the line where it says I posted a reply, it said "undoing moderation to comment #123456" (what really bugs me is that it also undid 2 other moderations that I had made in that story). Oh well. There's more to life than Slashdot, right? Right?
Oops. I forgot to post anonymously; /. undid my moderation. Just pretend that my comment never existed. Moderators: don't bother with either of my comments here.
How embarassing...
Had to mod this down... It really is funny, but I don't think it should take up space with the answerable questions that are sent. (That is, of course, unless he really can read it, and it wasn't meant to be funny.)
Others have suggested that comments obviously intended as 'funny' should not be sent in the interview (as I remember the Kevin Mitnik "What's my PayPal account password?") but I don't believe it has been instituted yet.
I'll probably take a metamoderation hit for it...
Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, Earth blue-screened
Arrgh! The dreaded Blue Sky Of Death! Microsoft has already hit!
That sucker's been Slashdotted! All I'm getting is a message saying:
Too many users... blah blah blah
Probable cause: http://www.slashdot.org
Try again in a few seconds...
-xian@idsoftware.com
Looks like more than one thing crashed over there...
Slightly OT, but about your parenthetical statement:
TFTs are the name for a specific type of LCD screen, also known as active-matrix screens. They are more expensive than passive-matrix displays, but they are generally regarded as bieng much better.
So, TFT is a more specific name, but LCD would be more accurate. See the webopedia for their definition of TFT.
When I clicked on your link, I got a page (entitled "Ook!") that said:
Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled.
I don't know if it's old news that Bugzilla is actively combatting the Slashdot Effect, but I find it kind of amusing/interesting/alarming that it doesn't accept Slashdot referers. Imagine if other sites start doing the same!
And just so you know, the parent posted a legit URL, but Bugzilla kicked it out.
BTW: you can just copy and paste the URL http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72540 into your browser to get the page c13v3rm0nk3y was talking about, or search for bug #72540.
In fact, in the powerbook spec sheet, it says:
Expansion
One 400-Mbps FireWire (IEEE 1394) port (9)
Two 12-Mbps USB ports
One PC Card/CardBus slot supporting one Type I or Type II card
12Mbps is just USB 1.1. USB 2.0 is 480Mbps.
I suppose I should have made that clear. I completely agree with you that those who are too lazy to check the facts are not worth paying attention to. Many disbelievers in moon-landing/evolution/round-earth do in fact fall into this category. However, to say that they fall into the category, without hearing arguments from every one of them, is a bit presumptuous.
It is extremely important to keep an open mind towards people, especially when they take an extremely unpopular stance. Otherwise, you could overlook an actual valid argument from an informed disbeliever.
Oh, and I found an interesting dilemma for current evolutionary ideas here. I think it's a religious page, but if you ignore the evolution-flaming, it brings up an obvious need for further study.
After doing some research, I realized that I suffered a huge brain-fart. The textbook said they took off from the far side of the Earth, not landed on the far side of the moon.
(Oh, and that's the far side of the Earth from the moon's point of view.)
I think that all the moon landings were on the far side, so that wouldn't do much good. Except, of course, if they were to go to the far side of the moon to see the sign. Then that would prove NASA's right, and we could just leave them there! </humor>
Anyone care to correct me on the far-side thing? I never really trusted the textbook I got that out of.
But... isn't this a good thing? If everyone believed what was obvious, many scientific advances would never have come about (or at least be accepted) It's really the people who ask the questions about the accepted world that come up with the most astonishing advances. Remember Galileo, who flew in the face the religious community by thinking that the Earth revolved around the Sun? He actually came up with a big batch o' evidence, and science flourished.
I will grant you that the moon-landing disbelievers have very little to do with the interest of science, but give them a chance and they might actually prove something.
This means that if there are people who want to deny everything that NASA is trying to tell them, then all the more power to them! If they can come up with the evidence (and they DO have some evidence, BTW) then they have the edge on all the people who follow blind faith.
Now, let me say that I believe NASA when they say they landed on the moon, simply because there is really no reason not to, but if someone is willing to stand up and say I'm wrong, I am more than willing to listen to them. Bieng closed-minded about peole who disagree with you is generally a foolish act, and I think the world would be for the better if everyone remembered that.
That sounds like what happened when I pulled the fan off my Athlon.
OK guys, this might be hard to follow, but try to stick with it:
White light does not exist. What we call "white" is just a color that seems to excite all your eye's receptors just about evenly. The fact that white light doesn't exist is the reason for the color "temperature" and "white points" you may have encountered if you calibrate your monitor.
In your post, you refer to a "true white" and I can assure you that there is no such thing. Our brains will actually filter any prevailing color out of what it sees and just call the result "white." If you've ever worn colored sunglasses you know that after a while, you just don't notice the color. Everything looks normal!
Our eyes, however, don't do the same to black. If light is coming off an object, then it's not black. This is why you need a K in CMYK: the C+M+Y just reflects far too much light to be called black.
This means that there is no need for a W in RGBW, since your eye will just accept any "white-ish" color to be "white" as long as it is present in enough of what you see.
I don't know if I explained myself clearly enough to make any sense, but I spent the past hour trying to get the wording right, and I'm not going to spend any more.