IMO (and I think I've probably been around/. longer than you), well thought-out pro-Microsoft comments get modded up without such stunts. In fact, Slashdot moderators are often far too kind to ill-informed, poorly-written pro-Microsoft rants in the interests of bending over backwards to appear fair and reasonable.
Firstly, I think the present refugee policy is immoral and probably illegal. I also agree with Australia's Opposition Leader, Mark Latham, who described the current Prime Minister as an "arselicker", (the target of his affections being GWB) and the entire government as (and I'm not making this quote up) forming "a conga line of suckholes" behind him. To top it all off, he described GWB as "the most dangerous and incompetant President in living memory". Crude, rather undiplomatic, but in all three cases accurate.
However, I would argue there is a very good reason why New Zealand doesn't share the same incohate "fear of the darkies" that John Howard and his merry men so shamefully exploited to win an election. Given the geography of the two countries, the only plausible route for the "darkies" to get anywhere near New Zealand is, through, well, Australia. Easy to point out your moral superiority in those circumstances.
As to Howard's chances in the next election, there is every chance he'll get the boot. Part of the reason the Liberals have stayed in power the last couple of times was the lame, timid leadership on the other side of politics. Whatever can be said about the new Opposition Leader, he's neither lame nor timid.
First, consider the economic side. For all of the special efforts and costs needed to cool down, test, and monitor an overclocked CPU, you could just buy a couple more for the same speedup effect.
Whilst I also think these overclocking games are mostly a waste of time, I just have to take issue with this claim. Some problems are easy to split up, so you can run them in parallel. Some are considerably harder, and require fancy low latency interconnection designs. Some are inherently impossible to speed up through parallelization.
The rabbit population was reduced in the 1950's by a deliberately introduced disease called myxomatosis.
Foxes were introduced well before this in the 19th century by English aristocratic dimwits who wanted to go fox hunting, along with their other great work like blackberries (which are a huge pest in the Australian bush).
Another rabbit virus called callicivirus was introduced about 10 years ago, which has also helped to bring the population down to a less damaging level.
There are dozens of other introduced pests that hugely damage the Australian natural environment and agricultural productivity, from cats, to weeds like Paterson's Curse. Due to this, and past successes, Australian governments throw a lot of money at research into biological control.
Whilst this is a legitimate concern, the main river system infected with carp in Australia is the Murray-Darling. Its mouth is several hundred kilometres away from any container ports, and in any case the last couple of hundred kilometres of its length are salty enough to keep carp out anyway (IIRC).
As I understand it, in parts of Asia they're a delicacy, whilst here the few people that have tried them reckon they taste something like a well-oiled version of the mud they spend their lives creating.
More seriously, the ecological problem they create is that they stir up so much mud in lakes and rivers they make them uninhabitable by anything else. They're also incredibly prolific. As far as most Australians are concerned, the only good carp is a dead carp.
It may not cause as much acid rain as it used to, but it still dumps a heck of a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Of course, nuclear power is probably a better solution from an environmental perspective, but try making *that* argument in public debate...
American advertising is *really* conservative...
on
10 Ads The US Won't See
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· Score: 2, Informative
Television advertising in Australia and the UK is considerably racier than in the US, and I believe the same is true in continental Europe. In fact, when I go to the states I'm constantly amazed by how much money American companies blow on such lame ads.
I'm from Australia, and the one thing that's extremely noticeable about US advertising is the huge numbers of drug commercials. Here in Australia, advertising perscription drugs is banned (though drug companies try to subvert the ban by funding ads that say something like "consult your doctor about treating disease X" without mentioning the drug they're pushing).
Given that you'd have to live in DC, or close to it, to run out of Smithsonians to visit (let alone the many other free governmental attractions), why the heck you'd set up an expensive commercial museum in the place is hard to understand.
Decent, cheap food, however - now there's a business opportunity:)
The whole point of this method is that their method takes about the same amount of time (or, at least, within a factor of 3 or 4) on your mother's P200 as it does on the spammer's dual Xeon.
How do they perform this alchemy? Well, whilst CPU cycle times shrink exponentially from year to year, DRAM access times do not. Over the past decade DRAM access times have decreased, but not that much - that's why CPU designers keep on increasing the amount of cache in their systems, to reduce cache misses. Therefore, if the task you're computing causes memory accesses in a pattern where most are cache misses, the performance differences between a fast and slow computer are comparatively small.
It appears, from the sketchy description in the article, that these researchers have figured a function that has this property that meets the other criteria you need to make the scheme work.
So, kudos to Microsoft for funding useful research. Of course, if it were ever to be implemented, Microsoft would have to remember to either a) not patent it, or b) make the patent available royalty-free.
Recording times accurately can get very complex in some cases, and longer time_t's aren't the whole solution.
Firstly, every so often a leap second is added to UTC. For this reason, over timescales of years it is impossible to exactly map unix time_t and calendar times.
Another issue is determining when a transaction happened that occurred across multiple time zones...
It's the most complex text editor ever written, used mainly by programmers to edit code and a million or so other things besides. Some programmers love it, others hate it, preferring the much more lightweight (but with its own UI issues) vi text editor, or alternatives like nedit.
The jargon file'sentry on EMACS gives some explanation, see also vi, and holy wars.
If the above links are still too opaque, and you need more details on EMACS itself rather than the culture wars, see the Wikipediaentry on Emacs.
The Spanish Apartment - bunch of European grad students sharing a cramped apartment in Barcelona. Laugh-out-loud funny, and, as an extra bonus, extended screen time for the stunningly hot Judith Godreche
Chicago - great tunes, mostly done justice (though Hugh Jackman would have been so much better than Richard Gere). I'm putting this is because it was released in 2003 in Australia.
8 Mile - for the MC battle at the end.
24 Hour Party People - sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.
Punch-drunk Love - an Adam Sandler movie that won't make you vomit, amazingly enough.
Secretary - Take your girlfriend to see this one;)
25th Hour - great ending sequence.
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind - find out who was responsible for trash TV, and what he got up to in his spare time (allegedly). Great direction by George Clooney (and no, that's not an oxymoron)
Kill Bill volume 1, though this only half counts as non-nerd, given the anime sequence.
Finally, a special award for 2 Fast 2 Furious, for the funniest crypto-homosexual undertones for a homophobic audience since Ben-Hur.
There's quite a lot of ethical outlooks (such as utilitarianism, as well as many interpretations of Christianity) that suggest that it is morally wrong to blow your wealth for your own amusement.
Ever heard of Project Orion, the plan to go to the Moon (as well as Mars and Jupiter), by sticking a really big, thick, steel and concrete plate at the back of a spacecraft and letting off atomic bombs behind it? Probably would have worked, too.
However, given his difficulties of getting hold of something relatively benign like hydrogen peroxide, I'm not liking Carmack's odds of getting the requisite quantities of plutonium:-)
In the 1980's, there was a huge fuss about the new high-temperature superconductors, and a lot of speculation in the popular science press about the coming revolution of room-temperature superconductors. Guess what? It never happened. Whilst the new superconductors have found industrial application, they sure aren't working at room temperature. The majority of the world's electricity is still carried on bits of copper and aluminium, and still suffers resistive losses.
Until somebody actually demonstrates a macroscopic piece of material with sufficient tensile strength to build a space elevator, I'm not getting too excited.
So we're left with two options - one, the US government is led by people who lied to get a war that nobody else wanted, or two, they were "dupes and fools" who read the intelligence completely wrong to run an unnecessary and hugely costly war.
Either way, if it were my country I'd be doing my best to ensure such people were removed from office at the earliest opportunity.
The proposal has drawn comparisons with the Channel Tunnel, that links England and France,
and raises the prospect of a continuous rail link between the north of Scotland and Africa.
And in other news: fog in (English) Channel, Continent isolated:)
One of the major points of the article is that for "flying cars" to work, the actual flying will have to be taken out of the hands of a human and given to a computer. Research on such things is well under way.
As far as maintenance goes, modern luxury cars do things like monitor tyre pressuers and service intervals. It's trivial to extend this to "refuse to take off unless service has been done".
Basically, the secret to being a good photographer is to take a lot of photos. The more you practice, the better you'll get, and the more good shots you'll get along the way - even if by chance:) So, in my view, a digital camera is likely to be a better learning tool as you can take as many photos as you want without having to worry about the expense.
Bruce, for the parts of Australia where this technology is going to be used, spectrum is the least of their worries. A maximum range of 20 kilometres (if that is indeed the maximum) is a *much* bigger problem than spectrum. Where this thing is likely to be used, there isn't any terrestrial television broadcasts to interfere with anyway. Oh, and there aren't too many hills to cause multipath distortion either.
Assumptions about communication technology that apply in the rest of the developed world often simply don't apply down here.
If aliens existed and were advanced enough to send us signals, they would in all probability have mastered the use of nano-technology and could probably fit a lot of things into extremely small spaces.
And how would these virus-sized particles navigate to Earth (including making the inevitable course corrections), and transmit the relevant information back to Rigel IV?
Ray Kurzweil's book makes a huge number of grandiose claims, some of which might come true, the vast majority of which probably won't. Very few of them are ever actually supported by much solid logic, let alone evidence.
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IMO (and I think I've probably been around /. longer than you), well thought-out pro-Microsoft comments get modded up without such stunts. In fact, Slashdot moderators are often far too kind to ill-informed, poorly-written pro-Microsoft rants in the interests of bending over backwards to appear fair and reasonable.
Firstly, I think the present refugee policy is immoral and probably illegal. I also agree with Australia's Opposition Leader, Mark Latham, who described the current Prime Minister as an "arselicker", (the target of his affections being GWB) and the entire government as (and I'm not making this quote up) forming "a conga line of suckholes" behind him. To top it all off, he described GWB as "the most dangerous and incompetant President in living memory". Crude, rather undiplomatic, but in all three cases accurate.
However, I would argue there is a very good reason why New Zealand doesn't share the same incohate "fear of the darkies" that John Howard and his merry men so shamefully exploited to win an election. Given the geography of the two countries, the only plausible route for the "darkies" to get anywhere near New Zealand is, through, well, Australia. Easy to point out your moral superiority in those circumstances.
As to Howard's chances in the next election, there is every chance he'll get the boot. Part of the reason the Liberals have stayed in power the last couple of times was the lame, timid leadership on the other side of politics. Whatever can be said about the new Opposition Leader, he's neither lame nor timid.
Whilst I also think these overclocking games are mostly a waste of time, I just have to take issue with this claim. Some problems are easy to split up, so you can run them in parallel. Some are considerably harder, and require fancy low latency interconnection designs. Some are inherently impossible to speed up through parallelization.
Another rabbit virus called callicivirus was introduced about 10 years ago, which has also helped to bring the population down to a less damaging level.
There are dozens of other introduced pests that hugely damage the Australian natural environment and agricultural productivity, from cats, to weeds like Paterson's Curse. Due to this, and past successes, Australian governments throw a lot of money at research into biological control.
Whilst this is a legitimate concern, the main river system infected with carp in Australia is the Murray-Darling. Its mouth is several hundred kilometres away from any container ports, and in any case the last couple of hundred kilometres of its length are salty enough to keep carp out anyway (IIRC).
More seriously, the ecological problem they create is that they stir up so much mud in lakes and rivers they make them uninhabitable by anything else. They're also incredibly prolific. As far as most Australians are concerned, the only good carp is a dead carp.
Of course, nuclear power is probably a better solution from an environmental perspective, but try making *that* argument in public debate...
I'm from Australia, and the one thing that's extremely noticeable about US advertising is the huge numbers of drug commercials. Here in Australia, advertising perscription drugs is banned (though drug companies try to subvert the ban by funding ads that say something like "consult your doctor about treating disease X" without mentioning the drug they're pushing).
Decent, cheap food, however - now there's a business opportunity :)
How do they perform this alchemy? Well, whilst CPU cycle times shrink exponentially from year to year, DRAM access times do not. Over the past decade DRAM access times have decreased, but not that much - that's why CPU designers keep on increasing the amount of cache in their systems, to reduce cache misses. Therefore, if the task you're computing causes memory accesses in a pattern where most are cache misses, the performance differences between a fast and slow computer are comparatively small.
It appears, from the sketchy description in the article, that these researchers have figured a function that has this property that meets the other criteria you need to make the scheme work.
So, kudos to Microsoft for funding useful research. Of course, if it were ever to be implemented, Microsoft would have to remember to either a) not patent it, or b) make the patent available royalty-free.
Firstly, every so often a leap second is added to UTC. For this reason, over timescales of years it is impossible to exactly map unix time_t and calendar times.
Another issue is determining when a transaction happened that occurred across multiple time zones...
We're not worried - we have our trusty anti-terrorism fridge magnets to protect us!
It's the most complex text editor ever written, used mainly by programmers to edit code and a million or so other things besides. Some programmers love it, others hate it, preferring the much more lightweight (but with its own UI issues) vi text editor, or alternatives like nedit. The jargon file's entry on EMACS gives some explanation, see also vi, and holy wars. If the above links are still too opaque, and you need more details on EMACS itself rather than the culture wars, see the Wikipedia entry on Emacs.
There's quite a lot of ethical outlooks (such as utilitarianism, as well as many interpretations of Christianity) that suggest that it is morally wrong to blow your wealth for your own amusement.
However, given his difficulties of getting hold of something relatively benign like hydrogen peroxide, I'm not liking Carmack's odds of getting the requisite quantities of plutonium :-)
Until somebody actually demonstrates a macroscopic piece of material with sufficient tensile strength to build a space elevator, I'm not getting too excited.
Last I checked it's a wealthy, peaceful country. The weather might be shitty, but there's not terribly much they can do about that...
Either way, if it were my country I'd be doing my best to ensure such people were removed from office at the earliest opportunity.
And in other news: fog in (English) Channel, Continent isolated :)
#ifdef LAZY_BASTARD_WHO_DIDNT_READ_ARTICLE
One of the major points of the article is that for "flying cars" to work, the actual flying will have to be taken out of the hands of a human and given to a computer. Research on such things is well under way. As far as maintenance goes, modern luxury cars do things like monitor tyre pressuers and service intervals. It's trivial to extend this to "refuse to take off unless service has been done".
#endif
Basically, the secret to being a good photographer is to take a lot of photos. The more you practice, the better you'll get, and the more good shots you'll get along the way - even if by chance :) So, in my view, a digital camera is likely to be a better learning tool as you can take as many photos as you want without having to worry about the expense.
Assumptions about communication technology that apply in the rest of the developed world often simply don't apply down here.
That's a really big deal in most cities in developing countries, which are choking under smog levels that make LA look like Alaska.
And how would these virus-sized particles navigate to Earth (including making the inevitable course corrections), and transmit the relevant information back to Rigel IV?
Ray Kurzweil's book makes a huge number of grandiose claims, some of which might come true, the vast majority of which probably won't. Very few of them are ever actually supported by much solid logic, let alone evidence.