Because they learn from their mistakes and adapt. China *was* the asian superpower before the West destroyed them by addicting them to opium. Looks like they aren't going to let that happen again... time to print out a certain 38-dimensional figure?
Yeah but taking away a felon's right to vote is a crock of shit. If they could vote we wouldn't have ridiculous drug laws that put people in jail for life, for example. We also wouldn't have prisons that are run like we're in the middle ages, because former inmates would vote for some sanity (in case they go back, and to help their friends in jail).
So what if "bad" countries can vote? It's like democracies that still allow the neighborhood bully to vote, or the spouse abuser. Or even the people who want the government to endorse Mormonism as the national religion (cf Orin Hatch). They still get to vote, but why should they? Because that's the whole freakin point of voting in the first place, that everybody gets one vote regardless of whether you agree with them ideologically or not, or whether you like them, or whether they have the most money or power.
1. It goes into the OS filesystem cache. After 5 seconds the modified data gets flushed to the disk (sometimes set to 30 sec). 2. It is written to the hard drive. Here, it sits in the hard drive controller's on-board cache until the head arrives at the write point, which is a fraction of a second. 3. It is written to disk.
So it *can* happen that data is not written properly, but unlike the scary picture you paint it is extremely unlikely. Even if you just saved your data, just do a sync and you'll be fine turning the power off.
You don't "rearrange" the MMU, you just check/clear the dirty bit in the page table. This bit is set by the hardware regardless so setting it is zero overhead. Clearing these bits is still only 0.006% the time of scanning all of memory. So unless you write to 32k unique pages per GC you get a huge benefit from this.
You could probably also use the MMU to reduce pauses in the gc... you determine what objects are unreachable in the background and using the dirty bit you can tell which pages may have references into the set, so instead of starting over from scratch again you just weed out the now-reachable objects from the set, which seems like it should be a much more tractable problem.
If I wasn't working I would do this. Check out jnode or jxos for example.
I think the more pertinent question is, with all this cruft added on to C/C++/asm to make it somewhat secure and programs a little bit less buggy, why not just write in a safe language like Java or 'managed' C# instead?
Individual memory allocations in Java were already much faster than plain C heaps before adding extra overhead from many more virtual memory maps and immediate free's. I mean a simple "free(malloc(8k));" is going to run maybe two or even three orders of magnitude slower than a safe language's "new char[8k];". And it's still going to be unsafe and buggy. So what's the actual advantage to old-school coding?
If the kernel was written in a safe language the MMU could handle the write barrier used by the garbage collector (gc) to reap short-lived objects. So when an object is collected, instead of scanning the whole memory to see if a reference was taken to it or doing lots extra work when any references are taken, the hardware just tells it which pages were written to. So if you allocate 1gb in N objects but only modify one page of memory, only one page of memory is scanned for references. Basically memory allocation/deallocation overhead in that best-case example would take about N + 0.000004 instructions (in general it would take more time, but still far less than non-GC based heaps). With unsafe malloc/free this would be more like 100*N and with this openbsd immediate-release it could easily be 1000*N or more. Hell if the kernel just had any help for safe languages at all this would be possible (unfortunately kernel developers are notoriously against this sort of thing on purely ideological grounds).
1. The processor microcode is encrypted and signed. [check] 2. The BIOS is encrypted and signed. [check] 3. The OS is encrypted and signed. 4. Digital fingerprinting of audio streams. [check] 5. Activate audio fingerprint for soundblaster in/out 6. Profit [check]
1 and 2 exist now on every x86 machine. 3 is trivial easy and 4 exists as applications. 5 just means adding fingerprinting to the audio path in the kernel.
If a law gets passed requiring "trusted computing" (you know as part of the war on terrorisms) then within a month or so all new computers could ship where you can't run a non-sanctioned linux, can't record unauthorized songs from your soundblaster, and can't play unauthorized songs from your soundblaster. Most old computers can be retro-actively patched with a bios update, which could be done automatically as compliance with the "Trusted Computing Act". Nobody will care except for geeks that build their own system and use linux/bsd. MacOS will be certified and Windows will be certified and that's like 98% of the market. Nobody will care because everything will still work just as it did before... until they start activating these digital restriction, tivo-style.
I just would like to point out to the naysayers that you can call a phone line and give it just a few seconds of music and it tells you what song it is. It's completely doable, in fact it's easy that you start playing an.mp3 from some rip and a few seconds later a box pops up asking for your credit card number. Hell one person working for like a month could patch openbios (on the few computers it works on) to only load a particular version of grub, which would only load a particular linux kernel.
Lets put it in context. If the average american put down 14 thousand square meters of white paper we could counter just the current loss of all that reflectivity. So adjusting for angle, maybe a few thousand square meters would do it. Given that the average american donated about $2 to the hurricane relief it doesn't seem possible.
But that's not the point even, just an indication of the massive scale of the problem. We can't even counter the effects of losing the ice, much less the cause that will keep accelerating the change. And that 'volcanoes do it too' is just bullshit... this is our fault, and ours alone. Sure, life will go on but not with us. Every massive climate shift has decimated the dominant species. Hell even just a large centipede just walking over us gives a red trail of irritation, and everything in nature will get more fearsome and deadly as the current order is destroyed. I'll be willing to bet that no technology will be enough to save our weak-ass selves us from nature gone wilder.
What's really sick though is the religious that want the world to end so they can be beamed up. They recklessly destroy the planet on the guess that they and they alone will be saved. But last I read of the bible, suicide doesn't get you into heaven so these people will be in for a rude (and hot) awakening.
Gimp's interface sucks because the windows are always misplaced, the tools options are all different sizes so they don't fit naturally in any group. So it's always messy, with tools in different positions on the screen, etc.
Photoshop sucks because the floating palettes are always overtop of some part of the image you want to see and they are a pain to re-arrange. It also sucks because it basically takes over the whole screen to be usable, so you can do nothing else at the same time or have to keep switching back and forth.
I'm posted this before on the Firefox article, but it really deserves repeating that Inkscape's UI is really, really good and is what the gimp should be modelled after, not photoshop. Editing SVG is far more complicated, but the inkscape UI is simple, takes up almost no space, and is easy to use. Maybe it wouldn't be good for serious graphic artists, but at least for new users and casual use a gimp that looked like that would be much better than either photoshop or the current gimp ui.
I think a much better example of a great UI in an open source application is Inkscape. It's got one tool bar on top, one on the side, and one status bar below, so you have almost the entire screen for the actual drawing. There's no floating windows. Strangely enough, everything I wanted to do was easy to find and use without the 5 levels of toolbar something like visio has. Basically, instead of having 100 controls for stroke, fill, pattern, etc these are on a dialog that is one-click away. It doesn't sound good, but it really works well in practice. Also, when you are dragging or hovering the mouse it gives useful tips like "Ctrl to scale uniformly Shift to scale around center of rotation" or "Enter completes the path" that also look slick.
Inkscape is a much better example than firefox imo, because a browser only has like a dozen common actions whereas the svg drawing program has hundreds. You just have to see it. The windows version has a few GTK related bugs, but the unix one is absolutely amazing.
Re:I'm not an expert...
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Office 12 Exposed
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· Score: 2, Interesting
What's really needed instead of configurable toolbars or ones with lots of options is a most-recently-used bar. So I could have an empty bar with Spotlight style search, and I type in "font c" and pick "font color" item. Or select it from the menu. Then it's on my recently used bar until it gets pushed off.
Really for most documents I only use a few tools, and I use them a lot. But these change over time (drafting, editing, proofing, etc) but I'm WAY too lazy to only configure the bar with JUST those few tools and then go into the configure... panel and choose more each time, which takes way too long.
I think what Microsoft was trying to do is have everything one-click away. So they started by putting 10 toolbars, but then people can't find what they are looking for. This new interface represents a compromise, where people can find what they want because they are grouped by function (with the other functions not visible). But what happens when you are reviewing changes to a form with headers/footers or something? You'll be clicking all around and panels will be changing and flying around everywhere!
My big beef with the office programs is that the vertical space, which is by far the most important, is literally 25% full of toolbars and junk! All I really need is a small 24 pixel-tall bar with 10 of the most recent tools on it, and a search field / 'start' button / or menu to find what tools are out there.
The review is totally bogus. The voice acting is completely absurd... it appears to have been aimed at 10-year-olds. For a 1.5 gb game demo I expect some decent graphics, but they were basically crap. I think the graphics are even worse than the original; they certainly have had no improvement at all except for a few pixel shaders that look out of place with the 100-polygon models. Games from 2001 (like Giants Citizen Kabuto) had more detailed character models! Another annoying thing from the first game is not being able to pan the camera past 30-degrees (you can't ever look into the distance). This is ridiculously irritating, but it's a limitation imposed so you won't see that there is no 3rd world, just a 3d path.
What is really annoying about this game is that there is exactly one story. You participate in countless dialog, but you only have one thing to say. Sometimes you can say it two ways, or have choices that have zero bearing on anything (contrast to Neverwinter Nights where lots of your dialog choices have consequences later on). Then there's the one path you can take through the entire game (there's no exploring).
Also, of course they want you to specialize your party by class; then later in the game they have an 'ambush' where the dudes attack your weak mage, and that's basically the entire challenge of the game. This game blows, I wouldn't even recommend playing the demo because it's pretty sad.
a) the fact is that ocean temperatures are rising. also, for the ice to melt and run off into the ocean to cool it, it has to absorb energy. but the area covered by ocean is far more than the area of ice, so it seems likely that the oceans would absorb far more energy than the ice, so would still be getting hotter. I suppose there could be some unlikely scenarios where the ice caps could lower the gulf temperature due to currents changing and whatnot. In any case, it seems incredibly reckless to bet the farm on that happening in our favor.
b) I thought the guard were 60% deployed, but I'll take your word for it. So Bush put us at 40% instead of 60%... that's such a minor detail, since either way it's bad news for the hurricane victims.
Bush isn't entirely responsible for hurricanes. They just happen. But it's a fact that higher water temperatures create stronger hurricanes... incidentally that's why weather reporters say "hurricane X may gain strength as it feeds on the warn water in Y". So, somebody responsible for increasing global warming is also partially responsible for stronger hurricanes. End of story.
For something debatable, weather simulations predict that if the gulf water temperature goes up by something like 2 degrees we will start getting massive superstorms. That's basically a category 5 that would cover the entire southeast and mid-atlantic at once. That's scaremongering... a storm of that size may alter global patterns and never even reach the continent. Of course it's also a fairly likely scenario. Scary, but likely.
Furthermore, Bush *did* send most of our national guard and military over to Iraq, where they are incapable of helping the relief effort. What if we had 100,000 more troops to distribute food, wall off dykes, and prevent looting? The relief effort would be in much better shape. The point being that just because the so-called "democratic underground" said it does not make it wrong.
Except the PPC has instructions to save multiple registers at once to memory. So you can save registers 3-8 to the stack in one 32-bit instruction. I assume the compilers you are using do not do this for parameters because it's faster not to. Much like x86 xor'ing a register with itself instead of setting it to zero.
So I would question what kind of functions these are that you say are takin 20+ instructions. But also, ultimately performance has little to do with the overhead of functions since the vast majority of time is spent in simple loops.
What you say is correct though, that functions are more wasteful on PPC, but another way to look at it is that languages like Java will run insanely fast on PPC since they hot spots are often inlined 5 or more functions deep -- something that is basically impossible with a language like C or C++. That means no function calls, and using up all the registers for something useful. RISC may be a poor choice for C... true dat.
Re:Its bad idea for several reasons
on
Defeating Captcha
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· Score: 1
It's a nice idea, but if there are just N links then by just trying randomly a bot has 1/N change of getting the right one, so you have to chain them.
What you could do is do that several times, with Java Script (or multiple pages) building basically a password or code from several of these sets of images in a row. The images would have to be dynamically created like in other captchas, but you could do things like tell the user to click the image with the blue smurf, but then have lots of blue humanoids in it. Or whatever, you get the idea.
But what would be even better would be to generate a large image will all sorts of junk in it and ask the user to click on different parts based on what they are. Then you can take the coords and make a long code out of it and the server checks each point for being in the correct location. Easy for people to do, but the computer basically has to be able to recognize any arbitrary thing that people can, as opposed to just highly regular shapes like characters. So if the user clicks on 6 shapes, and they take up as much as 1/20th of the area, that's 20^5 or 64 million possibilities. I believe this is what you were thinking.
This method can be used to create arbitrarily good captchas and I bet is much easier for the common person to do (ie type in these weird distorted letters vs click on the monkey?). And if a spammer makes a program to recognize the images you are using, you just drop in different ones (unlike text capchas where you have to change your algorithm). The spammer would have to write a program that can differentiate arbitrary images from one another using some kind of AI. Awesome.
Re:Its bad idea for several reasons
on
Defeating Captcha
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The sites with really good captcha's should run anti-captcha's... to filter out the *reallly* hard to read ones. =P
But there are still a lot of ways that haven't been used yet to make the image hard to read for the computer but less hard than the expreme distortions, such as overlapping letters and words. For example, if say only 25% of a word is covered up by another word on top of it, it should still be very easy for a normal person to read both words. Or use different colors and transparency. Or chain capchas together, for example one captcha that says "green" or "small" and another full of letters of various color/size/whatever. Then ask the user to enter the right code (ie, so they have to use reasoning instead of just pattern recognition).
Badcoda: "The Patriot Act card allows me to draw 100 Corrupt Senators from my deck and summon them in attack mode."
Badcoda: "But that's not all! I'll place this trap card face down in defence mode [screen shows President card] and end my turn. HA HA HA. I'll let you have one turn before I destroy you Yugi!!!"
Yugi, thinking: "100 senators? they'll destroy my Guevarra card and half of my life points. He's undefeatable!... No! I just have to believe in the cards!". Yugioh draws.
Yugi: "Not so fast, Badcoda! I play Unbridled Capitalism in defense mode and end my turn. This card absorbs attacks and gives my monsters 7% attack power profit from after each attack blocked. And since it has no physical form it cannot be destoyed!"
Badcoda: "Nice try yugi. I sacrifice 50 senators to summon... Psycopathic CEO and attack! Psycopathic CEO can destroy even the healthiest economies." [Psycopathic CEO destroys Yugi's Unbridled Capitalism and takes off 1200 life points]
Yugio: "Aaaah! Whaa? I put my faith in the cards, how could I have lost?" [badcoda attacks with his 50 remaining senators] "Aaaaaaaaah!"
I always though "broadband over power lines" was just a convenient way to say that the power company is providing internet service. But why does it have to mean actually through the power lines? Why doesn't the power company just put some wireless repeaters on the poles? Seems like they could have a focused beam to the next pole pretty easy so it would have essentially zero noise. They could probably even use induction from high-voltage lines to power it. It seems like that would have far more potential for keeping up with the competition, long-term.
Since you are the actual researcher doing this, do you ever think it's sad that we may take something as ancient and successful as the crocodile's immune system and essentially popularize it to the point where bacteria and other germs basically have to evolve ways to conquer it?
It seems like the essential result of successful research is that crocodile's will be far more susceptible to pathogens due to our meddling. I just think it's sad that we might end up saving masses of chickens in some agricultural jiffy-pop factory and at the same time killing off 'monsters' that have survived since basically forever.
So while there is nothing wrong per-se with your individual research, do you ever consider the moral implications of how your research will be used?
Yes but can you image coding that in C? It would be a freakin' nightmare. I think that's John's real problem with threads and multi-core systems. It's probably why he's also down on ps3... for that you basically have to write small independent modules that work well in parallel; it's kinda the origami mindset... a Japanese developer might develop a beautiful, self-contained, self-directed NCP for ps3 whereas John's western mindset would make a page of AI code that gets everything sorta-ok.
What's needed for next-gen game programming is something like Java, where threads and game logic is ridiculously simple, but with the ability to micro-manage time slices and data formats. AFAIK a language like that doesn't exist yet. What's clear to me though is that if we start getting 4+ cpu machines game programming will be done in something besides C and C++, whatever that may be.
If you look that the traffic for mozilla.org you see a slight downward trend during summer and a massive spike just recently in august, coinciding with the kids going back to school.
So basically the kids using firefox at school stopped for the summer because some of them were using their parents computers that had IE. Now that the kids have gone back to school the ones that weren't using firefox are downloading it in huge numbers (probably mostly to be cool). Next set of statistics will probably show a 2% rise for firefox, imho due to this.
total files - 960,000 kernel - 2.6.13-rc3-mm1, smp, preempt mem - 1gb max swap - 5gb fs - reiser 4, noatime
several ~4gb files that get random parts modified a lot, lots of small files being created/deleted.
I've tried this exact same setup on JFS, ext3, and resier 3 (by tar'ing system to other computer, mkfs, untar) and none of them had this problem except reiser 4.
Rsync works within files too. If they change one ebuild in an uncompressed portage.zip you'll download just that one piece. There's some overhead to hash the other parts, but it's roughly equivalent to the overhead of sending a filelist + modtime for 120k files. Since zip compresses files individually you could probably change one file even with a compressed zip and still only download that one file.
I was talking about Reiser 4 FS not ReiserFS (ie version 3). I also have a mix of largs files (4gb) and lots of tiny files for portage. Maybe that's why.
Slashdot Mirror
Because they learn from their mistakes and adapt. China *was* the asian superpower before the West destroyed them by addicting them to opium. Looks like they aren't going to let that happen again... time to print out a certain 38-dimensional figure?
Yeah but taking away a felon's right to vote is a crock of shit. If they could vote we wouldn't have ridiculous drug laws that put people in jail for life, for example. We also wouldn't have prisons that are run like we're in the middle ages, because former inmates would vote for some sanity (in case they go back, and to help their friends in jail).
So what if "bad" countries can vote? It's like democracies that still allow the neighborhood bully to vote, or the spouse abuser. Or even the people who want the government to endorse Mormonism as the national religion (cf Orin Hatch). They still get to vote, but why should they? Because that's the whole freakin point of voting in the first place, that everybody gets one vote regardless of whether you agree with them ideologically or not, or whether you like them, or whether they have the most money or power.
Close, but no cigar:
1. It goes into the OS filesystem cache. After 5 seconds the modified data gets flushed to the disk (sometimes set to 30 sec).
2. It is written to the hard drive. Here, it sits in the hard drive controller's on-board cache until the head arrives at the write point, which is a fraction of a second.
3. It is written to disk.
So it *can* happen that data is not written properly, but unlike the scary picture you paint it is extremely unlikely. Even if you just saved your data, just do a sync and you'll be fine turning the power off.
You don't "rearrange" the MMU, you just check/clear the dirty bit in the page table. This bit is set by the hardware regardless so setting it is zero overhead. Clearing these bits is still only 0.006% the time of scanning all of memory. So unless you write to 32k unique pages per GC you get a huge benefit from this.
You could probably also use the MMU to reduce pauses in the gc... you determine what objects are unreachable in the background and using the dirty bit you can tell which pages may have references into the set, so instead of starting over from scratch again you just weed out the now-reachable objects from the set, which seems like it should be a much more tractable problem.
If I wasn't working I would do this. Check out jnode or jxos for example.
I think the more pertinent question is, with all this cruft added on to C/C++/asm to make it somewhat secure and programs a little bit less buggy, why not just write in a safe language like Java or 'managed' C# instead?
Individual memory allocations in Java were already much faster than plain C heaps before adding extra overhead from many more virtual memory maps and immediate free's. I mean a simple "free(malloc(8k));" is going to run maybe two or even three orders of magnitude slower than a safe language's "new char[8k];". And it's still going to be unsafe and buggy. So what's the actual advantage to old-school coding?
If the kernel was written in a safe language the MMU could handle the write barrier used by the garbage collector (gc) to reap short-lived objects. So when an object is collected, instead of scanning the whole memory to see if a reference was taken to it or doing lots extra work when any references are taken, the hardware just tells it which pages were written to. So if you allocate 1gb in N objects but only modify one page of memory, only one page of memory is scanned for references. Basically memory allocation/deallocation overhead in that best-case example would take about N + 0.000004 instructions (in general it would take more time, but still far less than non-GC based heaps). With unsafe malloc/free this would be more like 100*N and with this openbsd immediate-release it could easily be 1000*N or more. Hell if the kernel just had any help for safe languages at all this would be possible (unfortunately kernel developers are notoriously against this sort of thing on purely ideological grounds).
1. The processor microcode is encrypted and signed. [check]
.mp3 from some rip and a few seconds later a box pops up asking for your credit card number. Hell one person working for like a month could patch openbios (on the few computers it works on) to only load a particular version of grub, which would only load a particular linux kernel.
2. The BIOS is encrypted and signed. [check]
3. The OS is encrypted and signed.
4. Digital fingerprinting of audio streams. [check]
5. Activate audio fingerprint for soundblaster in/out
6. Profit [check]
1 and 2 exist now on every x86 machine. 3 is trivial easy and 4 exists as applications. 5 just means adding fingerprinting to the audio path in the kernel.
If a law gets passed requiring "trusted computing" (you know as part of the war on terrorisms) then within a month or so all new computers could ship where you can't run a non-sanctioned linux, can't record unauthorized songs from your soundblaster, and can't play unauthorized songs from your soundblaster. Most old computers can be retro-actively patched with a bios update, which could be done automatically as compliance with the "Trusted Computing Act". Nobody will care except for geeks that build their own system and use linux/bsd. MacOS will be certified and Windows will be certified and that's like 98% of the market. Nobody will care because everything will still work just as it did before... until they start activating these digital restriction, tivo-style.
I just would like to point out to the naysayers that you can call a phone line and give it just a few seconds of music and it tells you what song it is. It's completely doable, in fact it's easy that you start playing an
Lets put it in context. If the average american put down 14 thousand square meters of white paper we could counter just the current loss of all that reflectivity. So adjusting for angle, maybe a few thousand square meters would do it. Given that the average american donated about $2 to the hurricane relief it doesn't seem possible.
But that's not the point even, just an indication of the massive scale of the problem. We can't even counter the effects of losing the ice, much less the cause that will keep accelerating the change. And that 'volcanoes do it too' is just bullshit... this is our fault, and ours alone. Sure, life will go on but not with us. Every massive climate shift has decimated the dominant species. Hell even just a large centipede just walking over us gives a red trail of irritation, and everything in nature will get more fearsome and deadly as the current order is destroyed. I'll be willing to bet that no technology will be enough to save our weak-ass selves us from nature gone wilder.
What's really sick though is the religious that want the world to end so they can be beamed up. They recklessly destroy the planet on the guess that they and they alone will be saved. But last I read of the bible, suicide doesn't get you into heaven so these people will be in for a rude (and hot) awakening.
for the novice at least...
Gimp's interface sucks because the windows are always misplaced, the tools options are all different sizes so they don't fit naturally in any group. So it's always messy, with tools in different positions on the screen, etc.
Photoshop sucks because the floating palettes are always overtop of some part of the image you want to see and they are a pain to re-arrange. It also sucks because it basically takes over the whole screen to be usable, so you can do nothing else at the same time or have to keep switching back and forth.
I'm posted this before on the Firefox article, but it really deserves repeating that Inkscape's UI is really, really good and is what the gimp should be modelled after, not photoshop. Editing SVG is far more complicated, but the inkscape UI is simple, takes up almost no space, and is easy to use. Maybe it wouldn't be good for serious graphic artists, but at least for new users and casual use a gimp that looked like that would be much better than either photoshop or the current gimp ui.
I think a much better example of a great UI in an open source application is Inkscape. It's got one tool bar on top, one on the side, and one status bar below, so you have almost the entire screen for the actual drawing. There's no floating windows. Strangely enough, everything I wanted to do was easy to find and use without the 5 levels of toolbar something like visio has. Basically, instead of having 100 controls for stroke, fill, pattern, etc these are on a dialog that is one-click away. It doesn't sound good, but it really works well in practice. Also, when you are dragging or hovering the mouse it gives useful tips like "Ctrl to scale uniformly Shift to scale around center of rotation" or "Enter completes the path" that also look slick.
Inkscape is a much better example than firefox imo, because a browser only has like a dozen common actions whereas the svg drawing program has hundreds. You just have to see it. The windows version has a few GTK related bugs, but the unix one is absolutely amazing.
What's really needed instead of configurable toolbars or ones with lots of options is a most-recently-used bar. So I could have an empty bar with Spotlight style search, and I type in "font c" and pick "font color" item. Or select it from the menu. Then it's on my recently used bar until it gets pushed off.
Really for most documents I only use a few tools, and I use them a lot. But these change over time (drafting, editing, proofing, etc) but I'm WAY too lazy to only configure the bar with JUST those few tools and then go into the configure... panel and choose more each time, which takes way too long.
I think what Microsoft was trying to do is have everything one-click away. So they started by putting 10 toolbars, but then people can't find what they are looking for. This new interface represents a compromise, where people can find what they want because they are grouped by function (with the other functions not visible). But what happens when you are reviewing changes to a form with headers/footers or something? You'll be clicking all around and panels will be changing and flying around everywhere!
My big beef with the office programs is that the vertical space, which is by far the most important, is literally 25% full of toolbars and junk! All I really need is a small 24 pixel-tall bar with 10 of the most recent tools on it, and a search field / 'start' button / or menu to find what tools are out there.
The review is totally bogus. The voice acting is completely absurd... it appears to have been aimed at 10-year-olds. For a 1.5 gb game demo I expect some decent graphics, but they were basically crap. I think the graphics are even worse than the original; they certainly have had no improvement at all except for a few pixel shaders that look out of place with the 100-polygon models. Games from 2001 (like Giants Citizen Kabuto) had more detailed character models! Another annoying thing from the first game is not being able to pan the camera past 30-degrees (you can't ever look into the distance). This is ridiculously irritating, but it's a limitation imposed so you won't see that there is no 3rd world, just a 3d path.
What is really annoying about this game is that there is exactly one story. You participate in countless dialog, but you only have one thing to say. Sometimes you can say it two ways, or have choices that have zero bearing on anything (contrast to Neverwinter Nights where lots of your dialog choices have consequences later on). Then there's the one path you can take through the entire game (there's no exploring).
Also, of course they want you to specialize your party by class; then later in the game they have an 'ambush' where the dudes attack your weak mage, and that's basically the entire challenge of the game. This game blows, I wouldn't even recommend playing the demo because it's pretty sad.
a) the fact is that ocean temperatures are rising. also, for the ice to melt and run off into the ocean to cool it, it has to absorb energy. but the area covered by ocean is far more than the area of ice, so it seems likely that the oceans would absorb far more energy than the ice, so would still be getting hotter. I suppose there could be some unlikely scenarios where the ice caps could lower the gulf temperature due to currents changing and whatnot. In any case, it seems incredibly reckless to bet the farm on that happening in our favor.
b) I thought the guard were 60% deployed, but I'll take your word for it. So Bush put us at 40% instead of 60%... that's such a minor detail, since either way it's bad news for the hurricane victims.
Bush isn't entirely responsible for hurricanes. They just happen. But it's a fact that higher water temperatures create stronger hurricanes... incidentally that's why weather reporters say "hurricane X may gain strength as it feeds on the warn water in Y". So, somebody responsible for increasing global warming is also partially responsible for stronger hurricanes. End of story.
For something debatable, weather simulations predict that if the gulf water temperature goes up by something like 2 degrees we will start getting massive superstorms. That's basically a category 5 that would cover the entire southeast and mid-atlantic at once. That's scaremongering... a storm of that size may alter global patterns and never even reach the continent. Of course it's also a fairly likely scenario. Scary, but likely.
Furthermore, Bush *did* send most of our national guard and military over to Iraq, where they are incapable of helping the relief effort. What if we had 100,000 more troops to distribute food, wall off dykes, and prevent looting? The relief effort would be in much better shape. The point being that just because the so-called "democratic underground" said it does not make it wrong.
Except the PPC has instructions to save multiple registers at once to memory. So you can save registers 3-8 to the stack in one 32-bit instruction. I assume the compilers you are using do not do this for parameters because it's faster not to. Much like x86 xor'ing a register with itself instead of setting it to zero.
So I would question what kind of functions these are that you say are takin 20+ instructions. But also, ultimately performance has little to do with the overhead of functions since the vast majority of time is spent in simple loops.
What you say is correct though, that functions are more wasteful on PPC, but another way to look at it is that languages like Java will run insanely fast on PPC since they hot spots are often inlined 5 or more functions deep -- something that is basically impossible with a language like C or C++. That means no function calls, and using up all the registers for something useful. RISC may be a poor choice for C... true dat.
It's a nice idea, but if there are just N links then by just trying randomly a bot has 1/N change of getting the right one, so you have to chain them.
What you could do is do that several times, with Java Script (or multiple pages) building basically a password or code from several of these sets of images in a row. The images would have to be dynamically created like in other captchas, but you could do things like tell the user to click the image with the blue smurf, but then have lots of blue humanoids in it. Or whatever, you get the idea.
But what would be even better would be to generate a large image will all sorts of junk in it and ask the user to click on different parts based on what they are. Then you can take the coords and make a long code out of it and the server checks each point for being in the correct location. Easy for people to do, but the computer basically has to be able to recognize any arbitrary thing that people can, as opposed to just highly regular shapes like characters. So if the user clicks on 6 shapes, and they take up as much as 1/20th of the area, that's 20^5 or 64 million possibilities. I believe this is what you were thinking.
This method can be used to create arbitrarily good captchas and I bet is much easier for the common person to do (ie type in these weird distorted letters vs click on the monkey?). And if a spammer makes a program to recognize the images you are using, you just drop in different ones (unlike text capchas where you have to change your algorithm). The spammer would have to write a program that can differentiate arbitrary images from one another using some kind of AI. Awesome.
The sites with really good captcha's should run anti-captcha's... to filter out the *reallly* hard to read ones. =P
But there are still a lot of ways that haven't been used yet to make the image hard to read for the computer but less hard than the expreme distortions, such as overlapping letters and words. For example, if say only 25% of a word is covered up by another word on top of it, it should still be very easy for a normal person to read both words. Or use different colors and transparency. Or chain capchas together, for example one captcha that says "green" or "small" and another full of letters of various color/size/whatever. Then ask the user to enter the right code (ie, so they have to use reasoning instead of just pattern recognition).
Or the yugioh version:
... No! I just have to believe in the cards!". Yugioh draws.
Badcoda: "Now I'll play the Patriot Act card."
Yugi: "Whaaa? I've never seen that card."
Badcoda: "The Patriot Act card allows me to draw 100 Corrupt Senators from my deck and summon them in attack mode."
Badcoda: "But that's not all! I'll place this trap card face down in defence mode [screen shows President card] and end my turn. HA HA HA. I'll let you have one turn before I destroy you Yugi!!!"
Yugi, thinking: "100 senators? they'll destroy my Guevarra card and half of my life points. He's undefeatable!
Yugi: "Not so fast, Badcoda! I play Unbridled Capitalism in defense mode and end my turn. This card absorbs attacks and gives my monsters 7% attack power profit from after each attack blocked. And since it has no physical form it cannot be destoyed!"
Badcoda: "Nice try yugi. I sacrifice 50 senators to summon... Psycopathic CEO and attack! Psycopathic CEO can destroy even the healthiest economies." [Psycopathic CEO destroys Yugi's Unbridled Capitalism and takes off 1200 life points]
Yugio: "Aaaah! Whaa? I put my faith in the cards, how could I have lost?" [badcoda attacks with his 50 remaining senators] "Aaaaaaaaah!"
I always though "broadband over power lines" was just a convenient way to say that the power company is providing internet service. But why does it have to mean actually through the power lines? Why doesn't the power company just put some wireless repeaters on the poles? Seems like they could have a focused beam to the next pole pretty easy so it would have essentially zero noise. They could probably even use induction from high-voltage lines to power it. It seems like that would have far more potential for keeping up with the competition, long-term.
Since you are the actual researcher doing this, do you ever think it's sad that we may take something as ancient and successful as the crocodile's immune system and essentially popularize it to the point where bacteria and other germs basically have to evolve ways to conquer it?
It seems like the essential result of successful research is that crocodile's will be far more susceptible to pathogens due to our meddling. I just think it's sad that we might end up saving masses of chickens in some agricultural jiffy-pop factory and at the same time killing off 'monsters' that have survived since basically forever.
So while there is nothing wrong per-se with your individual research, do you ever consider the moral implications of how your research will be used?
Yes but can you image coding that in C? It would be a freakin' nightmare. I think that's John's real problem with threads and multi-core systems. It's probably why he's also down on ps3... for that you basically have to write small independent modules that work well in parallel; it's kinda the origami mindset... a Japanese developer might develop a beautiful, self-contained, self-directed NCP for ps3 whereas John's western mindset would make a page of AI code that gets everything sorta-ok.
What's needed for next-gen game programming is something like Java, where threads and game logic is ridiculously simple, but with the ability to micro-manage time slices and data formats. AFAIK a language like that doesn't exist yet. What's clear to me though is that if we start getting 4+ cpu machines game programming will be done in something besides C and C++, whatever that may be.
If you look that the traffic for mozilla.org you see a slight downward trend during summer and a massive spike just recently in august, coinciding with the kids going back to school.
So basically the kids using firefox at school stopped for the summer because some of them were using their parents computers that had IE. Now that the kids have gone back to school the ones that weren't using firefox are downloading it in huge numbers (probably mostly to be cool). Next set of statistics will probably show a 2% rise for firefox, imho due to this.
total files - 960,000
kernel - 2.6.13-rc3-mm1, smp, preempt
mem - 1gb
max swap - 5gb
fs - reiser 4, noatime
several ~4gb files that get random parts modified a lot, lots of small files being created/deleted.
I've tried this exact same setup on JFS, ext3, and resier 3 (by tar'ing system to other computer, mkfs, untar) and none of them had this problem except reiser 4.
Rsync works within files too. If they change one ebuild in an uncompressed portage.zip you'll download just that one piece. There's some overhead to hash the other parts, but it's roughly equivalent to the overhead of sending a filelist + modtime for 120k files. Since zip compresses files individually you could probably change one file even with a compressed zip and still only download that one file.
So end result is no change in mirror bandwidth.
I was talking about Reiser 4 FS not ReiserFS (ie version 3). I also have a mix of largs files (4gb) and lots of tiny files for portage. Maybe that's why.