What bothers me about this kind of "preservation of life" is that life seems to be valued according to its resemblance to us. A much bigger deal seems to be made about endangered mammals and animal testing on creatures that have cute little faces than about less easily marketable species. Some people apparently have the opinion that eating fish or birds is more morally acceptable than eating red meat, not to mention plant life which does not happen to have the flippy-floppy bits to move it around.
Veganism in itself isn't such a bad idea since it means making more efficient use of resources, but currently the most ethical diet would be to not eat anything at all.
Is there nothing you would not fight for? Nothing?
Perhaps for abolishing the idea that violence is a tool for solving social problems and differences, and for adopting reason in place of jumping into rash conclusions based on emotional responses to incomplete pieces of information.
Although if you meant fight as in contradict my agenda by attacking people who have little to do with it, then I must disappoint you.
On the contrary, it seems that the hardware vendors are intent on directing platforms other than Windows to optimal porn use. Printers that won't print, scanners that won't scan and phone line modems (too slow for porn!) that won't call without their Windows-only proprietary drivers.
Well actually extraordinary claims scientifically should require no more evidence than any other claim to support them.
Perhaps I should have phrased "claims extraordinary in light of preceding evidence" and "evidence extraordinary in that it puts said body of previous evidence into a new light" but it doesn't sound as snazzy.
If there is sound logic then there is in fact something to refute. Any solution to a problem that is consistent with the evidence is called a hypothesis and can not be rightfully dismissed out of hand.
Throwing around outrageous ideas might make one a lucky guesser. Testing them makes one a scientist.
"The memory of a goldfish is only three seconds long" is something that's very short and easy to pronounce, but it's not nearly as trivial to test. It continues to live on because it makes a nice story (despite in fact having been tested to be false). However, there's little scientific value to uttering such a sentence, unless one's willing to do the hard work.
When you troubleshoot, you start with the most likely cause of the problem.
Likewise to how a scientist might approach the goldfish claim by examining and testing the underlying presumptions first. Is a measure of time in any sense a useful way of measuring a creature's memory capacity? If so, exactly what kind of responses is it relevant to? Knowing that, what would be an effective way of testing this capacity?
A smart technician will replace the CPU fan and the entire power supply in one shot. If the system continues to fail you suddenly are moving into less sure territory.
If someone came to me and said that the system reboots itself because the video card is faulty I would laugh. After all, I can load up 3D games on the computer without any problems.
A smart technician, with limited resources, can look up diagnostics to isolate the problem instead of beginning with replacing key parts of the system. Processors and motherboards report thermal readings, system logs can reveal hardware and driver anomalies, and so on.
Your video card just might be handling I/O in a way which your motherboard's chipset doesn't particularly like, and which only causes problems during periods of active use. Or some unit within it might have a defect which only surfaces now and then and causes the driver to panic. But claiming any of this in the beginning of the troubleshooting process would indeed be dubious.
The pressure of presenting extraordinary evidence to support an extraordinary claim is on the presenter of said claim. If there's no evidence, there's nothing to refute. Myths survive because people like to give baseless claims the benefit of doubt.
Continuous phenomena can be approximated, meaning that you can represent some useful set of values with finite precision. Currently your graphics hardware approximates the colour spectrum with three integer components ranging between 0 and 255. It could be better, but obviously it's functional enough and you don't need infinite storage or transfer bandwidth.
Seeing as HDR techniques are pretty much all the rage in graphics right now, I wouldn't be surprised if the pipeline were to go entirely floating point in the near future. That's to say, you would be able to represent a finite set of decimal values within very reasonable amounts of storage space. Current real-time HDR renderers use 16-bit floating-point components, which already provides quite nice quality.
That's just to say that he's a proverbial asshole in that way. I don't know where the idea that cellphones "don't work" on planes came from, but in fact they cause far more trouble there by "working".
The movie and record industries don't have a very good track record of following on those lines. Anyone can overcome CSS and Macrovision, but there seems to be enough collective fear about piracy around that even appalling protection measures seem better than nothing to them. Hence, it doesn't seem completely useless to build it everywhere, and thus the protection vendors profit and legit customers keep cursing the completely artifical limitations set down upon them.
That depends on whether you really want to end up with a dedicated game console. Lots of people play games on their desktop computer and yet don't have one primarily for that purpose.
If you'd want to tip the balance in PC gaming, you'd have to gain enough momentum by attracting the current (Windows) gamers and it's not at all certain a Linux-based console will help the gaming situation that much on desktop Linux. Xbox's influence on Windows gaming has certainly been somewhat questionable, since there's a lot of games that have essentially been designed for the console and then ported to run on a PC.
Seriously, the Linux software field isn't what it's cracked up to be by people who last checked the situation a decade ago. It's not exactly rocket science to put together a binary package of a game that will run on a wide range of distributions. Sure, since you're only distributing a binary, the underlying platform will gradually change in ways that'll render it inoperable. You can witness that in the older Windows games that no longer work as-is on XP.
They are communists, as their actions clearly show, but they tend to get annoyed when described as such.
Despite the fact that greed is such an integral part of today's culture, I think there's still a solid difference between that and actually advocating an alternative social structure. A thief (a real one, as in property) or a software pirate is simply a person who's chosen to go by his own rules despite society.
I certainly believe information wants to be free, but I prefer using and creating free information and advocating the idea to others. Piratpartiet has an agenda I tend to agree with, but I'm not so sure about some people's reasons for supporting it.
Also, since when is the entirety of Linux considered stable? Half the time the drivers are up in the air, and there's enough competition and conflict between various builds and organisations as to achieve bugger all on a standards level.
Are you perhaps developing for Win32, MFC,.NET 1.0 or perhaps 2.0 today? What version are your MSVC runtimes, how about DirectX? Do any of those choices guarantee that the end-user's drivers aren't absolute crap (which sadly isn't all that uncommon) or that his computer isn't, say, loaded to the brim with malware before he runs your game?
There's several Linux distributions with recent stable releases out there, with libraries that have stable APIs and sensible version numbering. Drivers, on the other hand, involve problems that even driver developers can hardly solve.
If game companies started porting to a stable Linux core, they'd be porting to Wii - THAT has a Linux OS with Opera installed.
So did you actually mean to say that the PC platform is unstable because the hardware setup isn't predictable?
I downloaded the corpus, and indeed, you're right -- it's 10^8 bytes. The article is incorrect, it says 100M where it means 95.3M.
Not incorrect, merely ambiguous. 100 MB in SI terms is exactly 10^8 bytes, and you can run that by just about any mass storage manufacturer. Powers of two are commonly used to refer to memory, and even to mass storage in software, but it's not uncommon for the "standards" to clash.
I'm not sure about "regular" Gnome, but in Ubuntu I have at least Firefox Web Browser, GIMP Image Editor, Thunderbird (and Evolution) Mail, Ekiga Softphone, Pan Newsreader, Rhythmbox Music Player and even Anjuta IDE and Glade Interface Designer. So, seems like they (whoever they are) like to do it as well.
I'm still relatively early in that age segment and I can't help thinking that Vista is set to bring a plethora of completely unnecessary hardware "advancements" to desktop users.
Gaming and high-end work are areas in themselves, but even the "low-end" of today is ridiculously overpowered for basic desktop work. The grandma of a few years into the future will perhaps have the privilege of buying a multi-core workstation with several gigabytes of memory and a versatile programmable GPU - in order to read her e-mail and write a few letters.
Not that hardware vendors will complain, mind you.
As it happens, the GNU project does have a working kernel of their own, HURD. HURD never really took off, mainly because Linux got the snowball effect going - it got some users, some of whom began co-developing it, making it better, which in turn gained it more users and more developers and so on.
As I understand it, at the time when Linux was released it was a working kernel, whereas HURD was more of a vague promise. You don't win users in a hacker culture by asking them to join you in formulating the ideal solution, you need to have something which (kind of) works and is good enough to be improved upon.
You think that Linux - a single operating system kernel - is going to have more lasting influence than the whole free software movement, of which the Linux kernel is just a part of ?
In the absence of Linux, perhaps BSD would've caught on and GNU gone the way of obscurity. Perhaps someone might've gone and implemented HURD's alleged original idea of adapting the BSD kernel as a base for the GNU system. Who knows, any number of things might have happened, but it's hardly appropriate to underestimate the part of Linux and its momentum in making GNU vastly more popular (in turn aiding the development of GNU tools, and so on).
Think what you will, but bear in mind that archaic GUI systems only tend to support low pixel and colour resolutions, and have no ways of taking advantage of modern acceleration hardware to take the load off your main CPU, even if they did somehow scale beyond that. The feature sets are much more modest than what people now expect from their workstation environment. That goes in part for later MacOS "Classic" as well, although to be fair it has other historical weights tied to its feet besides the GUI.
Hand-crafted assembly code would be a fool's route to take these days as you'll only write for one CPU architecture, probably lose some other hardware abstraction while at it, take a much longer time to write the code (presuming you actually want hand-optimisation to be of use), and even then your C compiler might be able to see some optimisation route that you don't. And when you need to switch architectures, you need to do it all over again. All that would be a royal waste of personnel resources for any project, and mostly for nothing.
there's a very strong black line where emulators stop.
If you look more closely, I was illustrating just that; there is a more precise meaning in this context but you can confuse things a lot by drawing in a dictionary definition. The last analogue is bad and misguided, though, since buses and personal cars serve quite distinctly different roles.
What would you call winelib in that case? It's exactly the same API reimplementation and works on the same platform, only it doesn't require the use of a PE loader. For that matter, what is glibc? Is GNU/Linux a Unix emulator?
This vague use of the concept of a "different system" certainly boggles the mind.
In order to use Linux instead of Windows, a person has to spend hundreds of hours relearning everything that they have already mastered about computer usage. If you don't know (and don't have the time) to learn the difference between a BSD telnet client or a PD NCSA telnet client then using Linux is simply not an option.
This smells more like a shift of delusion to the other extreme. I haven't been aware of the subtle nuances of telnet clients for the several years I've been successfully using Linux as my primary home platform. Neither is my sister, who can handle Gnome very well for the same basic tasks she uses Windows for. Neither, I'm sure, are many office workers who use Linux at work.
There's a solid difference between what knowledge you need to use a system and what you need to fully understand it, and you seem to be confusing the two.
The smaller that the version of Linux is that you install, the more computer knowledge that you need to make it work.
If you lack the knowledge to make Damn Small Linux work, I doubt you could get a Windows 98 installation from scratch to a useful state by yourself either. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who installs his own operating system, you're already much more likely to be the person who can read instructions and actually use his head to learn some absolute basics.
This fairly clearly implies intelligent action. I.E. something did the hiding.
I suppose they could rephrase it as "directly imperceptible" but I fail to see the necessity. The term "hidden variable", for instance, no more implies that some mischievous students played a prank on their unsuspecting professor.
Popularised science in general uses imprecise language to stay within the constraints of our usual hairless monkey terms. After all, it's intended to appeal to people who aren't familiar with the established terminology of a field, where the use of that terminology may even differ from its use in a more common context. Just take note of how many things are claimed to "fly" or "fall" in outer space.
If you insist on being objective and precise, there's painstaking long-hand and mathematical notation, but I'd guess that doesn't really make for an interesting read to many non-astrophysicists.
Yes, there are distributions that are good and free, but won't become a first class Desktop system for free.
You do realise that not every free-as-in-beer distribution is made on a shoestring? Ubuntu, for one, has a wealthy foundation to support its development, and is now being commercially supported by Canonical (which has little direct affiliation otherwise). Debian appears to be doing well in terms of effort if not hard cash, although their primary goals are not in creating a desktop system. Fedora is directly sponsored by Red Hat. And so on. It takes quite a lot more than a few guys in a basement to keep any distribution project of that calibre running, not to mention progressing.
There are many of you that can't afford to purchase software or OSes of any sort, fair enough. But if you have the money, and you use Linux, you should seriously think about supporting software companies that support Linux. That is, if you want to see Linux grow out of it's nitch.
Speaking as a student with low income, I'd rather that my money and support went to companies and foundations that support wider ranges of FOSS projects, instead of commercial distribution and proprietary software vendors which aim to improve their own product lines.
I would imagine it would be more economical to buy 500 1 gHz chips at $40 a piece (current bulk price for a 1 gZh chip).
Unless you require a single chip running at 500 GHz for some specific signal processing application - in which case the complexity of the chip would not be that tremendous and the manufacturing costs therefore much lower. Not all ICs are meant to be general-purpose computers, after all. (Not to mention that actual processing power doesn't grow in a linear fashion as you add cores, but that's beside the point.)
You're probably right in that nanowires will have applicability in a broader range, and the embedded market will most certainly be thrilled to get their hands at them.
Slashdot Mirror
What bothers me about this kind of "preservation of life" is that life seems to be valued according to its resemblance to us. A much bigger deal seems to be made about endangered mammals and animal testing on creatures that have cute little faces than about less easily marketable species. Some people apparently have the opinion that eating fish or birds is more morally acceptable than eating red meat, not to mention plant life which does not happen to have the flippy-floppy bits to move it around.
Veganism in itself isn't such a bad idea since it means making more efficient use of resources, but currently the most ethical diet would be to not eat anything at all.
Perhaps for abolishing the idea that violence is a tool for solving social problems and differences, and for adopting reason in place of jumping into rash conclusions based on emotional responses to incomplete pieces of information.
Although if you meant fight as in contradict my agenda by attacking people who have little to do with it, then I must disappoint you.
Sadly, not nearly all teachers can be great teachers.
On the contrary, it seems that the hardware vendors are intent on directing platforms other than Windows to optimal porn use. Printers that won't print, scanners that won't scan and phone line modems (too slow for porn!) that won't call without their Windows-only proprietary drivers.
Perhaps I should have phrased "claims extraordinary in light of preceding evidence" and "evidence extraordinary in that it puts said body of previous evidence into a new light" but it doesn't sound as snazzy.
Throwing around outrageous ideas might make one a lucky guesser. Testing them makes one a scientist.
"The memory of a goldfish is only three seconds long" is something that's very short and easy to pronounce, but it's not nearly as trivial to test. It continues to live on because it makes a nice story (despite in fact having been tested to be false). However, there's little scientific value to uttering such a sentence, unless one's willing to do the hard work.
Likewise to how a scientist might approach the goldfish claim by examining and testing the underlying presumptions first. Is a measure of time in any sense a useful way of measuring a creature's memory capacity? If so, exactly what kind of responses is it relevant to? Knowing that, what would be an effective way of testing this capacity?
A smart technician, with limited resources, can look up diagnostics to isolate the problem instead of beginning with replacing key parts of the system. Processors and motherboards report thermal readings, system logs can reveal hardware and driver anomalies, and so on.
Your video card just might be handling I/O in a way which your motherboard's chipset doesn't particularly like, and which only causes problems during periods of active use. Or some unit within it might have a defect which only surfaces now and then and causes the driver to panic. But claiming any of this in the beginning of the troubleshooting process would indeed be dubious.
The pressure of presenting extraordinary evidence to support an extraordinary claim is on the presenter of said claim. If there's no evidence, there's nothing to refute. Myths survive because people like to give baseless claims the benefit of doubt.
Continuous phenomena can be approximated, meaning that you can represent some useful set of values with finite precision. Currently your graphics hardware approximates the colour spectrum with three integer components ranging between 0 and 255. It could be better, but obviously it's functional enough and you don't need infinite storage or transfer bandwidth.
Seeing as HDR techniques are pretty much all the rage in graphics right now, I wouldn't be surprised if the pipeline were to go entirely floating point in the near future. That's to say, you would be able to represent a finite set of decimal values within very reasonable amounts of storage space. Current real-time HDR renderers use 16-bit floating-point components, which already provides quite nice quality.
That's just to say that he's a proverbial asshole in that way. I don't know where the idea that cellphones "don't work" on planes came from, but in fact they cause far more trouble there by "working".
The movie and record industries don't have a very good track record of following on those lines. Anyone can overcome CSS and Macrovision, but there seems to be enough collective fear about piracy around that even appalling protection measures seem better than nothing to them. Hence, it doesn't seem completely useless to build it everywhere, and thus the protection vendors profit and legit customers keep cursing the completely artifical limitations set down upon them.
That depends on whether you really want to end up with a dedicated game console. Lots of people play games on their desktop computer and yet don't have one primarily for that purpose.
If you'd want to tip the balance in PC gaming, you'd have to gain enough momentum by attracting the current (Windows) gamers and it's not at all certain a Linux-based console will help the gaming situation that much on desktop Linux. Xbox's influence on Windows gaming has certainly been somewhat questionable, since there's a lot of games that have essentially been designed for the console and then ported to run on a PC.
Seriously, the Linux software field isn't what it's cracked up to be by people who last checked the situation a decade ago. It's not exactly rocket science to put together a binary package of a game that will run on a wide range of distributions. Sure, since you're only distributing a binary, the underlying platform will gradually change in ways that'll render it inoperable. You can witness that in the older Windows games that no longer work as-is on XP.
Despite the fact that greed is such an integral part of today's culture, I think there's still a solid difference between that and actually advocating an alternative social structure. A thief (a real one, as in property) or a software pirate is simply a person who's chosen to go by his own rules despite society.
I certainly believe information wants to be free, but I prefer using and creating free information and advocating the idea to others. Piratpartiet has an agenda I tend to agree with, but I'm not so sure about some people's reasons for supporting it.
Are you perhaps developing for Win32, MFC, .NET 1.0 or perhaps 2.0 today? What version are your MSVC runtimes, how about DirectX? Do any of those choices guarantee that the end-user's drivers aren't absolute crap (which sadly isn't all that uncommon) or that his computer isn't, say, loaded to the brim with malware before he runs your game?
There's several Linux distributions with recent stable releases out there, with libraries that have stable APIs and sensible version numbering. Drivers, on the other hand, involve problems that even driver developers can hardly solve.
So did you actually mean to say that the PC platform is unstable because the hardware setup isn't predictable?
Not incorrect, merely ambiguous. 100 MB in SI terms is exactly 10^8 bytes, and you can run that by just about any mass storage manufacturer. Powers of two are commonly used to refer to memory, and even to mass storage in software, but it's not uncommon for the "standards" to clash.
I'm not sure about "regular" Gnome, but in Ubuntu I have at least Firefox Web Browser, GIMP Image Editor, Thunderbird (and Evolution) Mail, Ekiga Softphone, Pan Newsreader, Rhythmbox Music Player and even Anjuta IDE and Glade Interface Designer. So, seems like they (whoever they are) like to do it as well.
I'm still relatively early in that age segment and I can't help thinking that Vista is set to bring a plethora of completely unnecessary hardware "advancements" to desktop users.
Gaming and high-end work are areas in themselves, but even the "low-end" of today is ridiculously overpowered for basic desktop work. The grandma of a few years into the future will perhaps have the privilege of buying a multi-core workstation with several gigabytes of memory and a versatile programmable GPU - in order to read her e-mail and write a few letters.
Not that hardware vendors will complain, mind you.
As I understand it, at the time when Linux was released it was a working kernel, whereas HURD was more of a vague promise. You don't win users in a hacker culture by asking them to join you in formulating the ideal solution, you need to have something which (kind of) works and is good enough to be improved upon.
In the absence of Linux, perhaps BSD would've caught on and GNU gone the way of obscurity. Perhaps someone might've gone and implemented HURD's alleged original idea of adapting the BSD kernel as a base for the GNU system. Who knows, any number of things might have happened, but it's hardly appropriate to underestimate the part of Linux and its momentum in making GNU vastly more popular (in turn aiding the development of GNU tools, and so on).
Not the OP's, but its modded-down reply was quite explicit, and that's probably what you missed.
Think what you will, but bear in mind that archaic GUI systems only tend to support low pixel and colour resolutions, and have no ways of taking advantage of modern acceleration hardware to take the load off your main CPU, even if they did somehow scale beyond that. The feature sets are much more modest than what people now expect from their workstation environment. That goes in part for later MacOS "Classic" as well, although to be fair it has other historical weights tied to its feet besides the GUI.
Hand-crafted assembly code would be a fool's route to take these days as you'll only write for one CPU architecture, probably lose some other hardware abstraction while at it, take a much longer time to write the code (presuming you actually want hand-optimisation to be of use), and even then your C compiler might be able to see some optimisation route that you don't. And when you need to switch architectures, you need to do it all over again. All that would be a royal waste of personnel resources for any project, and mostly for nothing.
If you look more closely, I was illustrating just that; there is a more precise meaning in this context but you can confuse things a lot by drawing in a dictionary definition. The last analogue is bad and misguided, though, since buses and personal cars serve quite distinctly different roles.
What would you call winelib in that case? It's exactly the same API reimplementation and works on the same platform, only it doesn't require the use of a PE loader. For that matter, what is glibc? Is GNU/Linux a Unix emulator?
This vague use of the concept of a "different system" certainly boggles the mind.
This smells more like a shift of delusion to the other extreme. I haven't been aware of the subtle nuances of telnet clients for the several years I've been successfully using Linux as my primary home platform. Neither is my sister, who can handle Gnome very well for the same basic tasks she uses Windows for. Neither, I'm sure, are many office workers who use Linux at work.
There's a solid difference between what knowledge you need to use a system and what you need to fully understand it, and you seem to be confusing the two.
If you lack the knowledge to make Damn Small Linux work, I doubt you could get a Windows 98 installation from scratch to a useful state by yourself either. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who installs his own operating system, you're already much more likely to be the person who can read instructions and actually use his head to learn some absolute basics.
I suppose they could rephrase it as "directly imperceptible" but I fail to see the necessity. The term "hidden variable", for instance, no more implies that some mischievous students played a prank on their unsuspecting professor.
Popularised science in general uses imprecise language to stay within the constraints of our usual hairless monkey terms. After all, it's intended to appeal to people who aren't familiar with the established terminology of a field, where the use of that terminology may even differ from its use in a more common context. Just take note of how many things are claimed to "fly" or "fall" in outer space.
If you insist on being objective and precise, there's painstaking long-hand and mathematical notation, but I'd guess that doesn't really make for an interesting read to many non-astrophysicists.
Yeah. Nice project, but does it have to be executed by humans?
You do realise that not every free-as-in-beer distribution is made on a shoestring? Ubuntu, for one, has a wealthy foundation to support its development, and is now being commercially supported by Canonical (which has little direct affiliation otherwise). Debian appears to be doing well in terms of effort if not hard cash, although their primary goals are not in creating a desktop system. Fedora is directly sponsored by Red Hat. And so on. It takes quite a lot more than a few guys in a basement to keep any distribution project of that calibre running, not to mention progressing.
Speaking as a student with low income, I'd rather that my money and support went to companies and foundations that support wider ranges of FOSS projects, instead of commercial distribution and proprietary software vendors which aim to improve their own product lines.
Unless you require a single chip running at 500 GHz for some specific signal processing application - in which case the complexity of the chip would not be that tremendous and the manufacturing costs therefore much lower. Not all ICs are meant to be general-purpose computers, after all. (Not to mention that actual processing power doesn't grow in a linear fashion as you add cores, but that's beside the point.)
You're probably right in that nanowires will have applicability in a broader range, and the embedded market will most certainly be thrilled to get their hands at them.