I'm trying to understand this desire to represent mundane computing tasks with real world analogies. It strikes me as cool too, but I couldn't tell you why.
It seems like we're reaching for the goal of a virtual world where you would craft something in this virtual world that would be a program, instead of the reverse where you craft a program to represent something in a virtual world. So instead of coding a firewall and representing it with a moat around your virtual castle, you would instruct your minions to dig a moat which would result in a firewall being constructed. But that requires a creative intelligence in the software, so instead we are stuck with fairly pathetic simulations that tickle this urge and make us want more.
It's cool to look at a simulation depicting your web traffic, and knowing that kid with a slingshot is a script kiddie, but you are still relying on somebody else's program to interpret your logs. To take an idea expressed in 'The Matrix', to see what is really going on, you have to look at the raw data.
\Ar`ch[ae]*ol"o*gy\, n. [Gr. ?; 'archai^os ancient (fr. 'archh` beginning) + ? discourse, ? to speak.] The science or study of antiquities, esp. prehistoric antiquities, such as the remains of buildings or monuments of an early epoch, inscriptions, implements, and other relics, written manuscripts, etc.
science
\Sci"ence\, n. [F., fr. L. scientia, fr. sciens, -entis, p. pr. of scire to know. Cf. Conscience, Conscious, Nice.] 1. Knowledge; knowledge of principles and causes; ascertained truth of facts.
As an ASIC designer who has worked on chips for the large systems like Sun makes, I can tell you from first hand experience that you don't "slap together" these hardware systems.
I hate replying to anonymous posts because it feels like I'm talking to a wall. But on the odd chance that you might read a reply, and for the edification of anyone else who cares, I'll post a retort.
I don't know how this topic got so side-railed, but I said it before and I'll say it again, I was talking about systems, not silicon. Okay?
I was replying in the context of the quote from sun saying "We have hardware, storage, services and support". Good grief, who doesn't? Is it that hard to build a raid box? No. Is it that hard to build a workstation? No. Heck, I can go to compusa and get a dual G5 for less money than this HP PA-RISC workstation under my desk, and it would make the HP look like a glorified print server.
Gee whiz, your an ASIC designer. Guess what? So am I. How 'bout them apples.
Anyone can churn out software at little or no cost, building a FAB is an plant entirely different matter
Well, I was talking about systems, not silicon. But even with that argument, there are some tremendously fast FPGAs out there, and you can even get open source RISC cpu cores from here.
So you don't need a FAB to build a CPU. The resources (that would be the legos I mentioned) are all out there.
Addressing the question of how Sun plans to make money with an open-source Solaris, he simply said that Sun doesn't have to rely on only the operating system. "We have hardware, storage, services and support. What we are doing is taking that whole thing and selling that whole thing," he said.
This looks like the exact opposite approach of Apple, who makes really cool closed source software to sell their hardware.
It seems to me that it's pretty easy to slap together hardware systems, but developing software systems is a little more daunting of a task. In hardware, it's like putting legos together.
Software tries to do that too, but everybody and their brother tries to make a better lego, and so you end up with millions of incompatible partial solutions that are very difficult to build up into a complete solution.
PCI-X and PCI Express are not the same protocol. PCI-X is still a 32/64 bit parallel bus that handles FIFOs a little differently than PCI (i.e. the master can transmit unless the target has enough fifo for a complete transaction). It also changes the timing of the bus to allow for speeds up to 133MHz.
"I just don't seem to understand why people just can't go watch a movie to watch a movie these days."
I'd like to... and occasionally I get the chance. The last movie I saw that didn't seem to have any real political motivations was "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" And I really enjoyed it.
I haven't seen "The Day After Tomorrow", and I actually don't even know if its been released yet, but I'm pretty sure it's a 'message' movie. I'd rather go see a movie for entertainment than for education. Stick it on the sci-fi channel or discovery or whatever, and I'd be more prone to watch it.
"it's just the loudmouth conservative wackos who perpetuate the stereotype that a Christian believes the world is four thousand years old."
Unfortunately, most people who call themselves Christians aren't. Being a Christian means that you have received Christ, and a virtue of having done this means that you are able to believe the Bible is the true and inerrant word of God. To people who have not received Christ, the Bible appears to be ridiculous nonsense.
According to the geneologies in the Bible, the earth is about 6000 years old.
And I'm sure that seems totally preposterous to just about everyone on slashdot. But surely the scientific minds of most slashdotters must realize that everything they know is taken on faith.
A quick example of this would be the concept of solipsism. Take a look here. Roughly speaking, solipsism is the idea that everything around you is a construct of your mind and doesn't necessarily exist. I guess this is a little like the idea used in The Matrix. As of yet, it's impossible to prove this idea false. So you have to take it on faith that it isn't true.
"Doesn't the Doppler shift reduce the frequency of the light? In that case as f drops so does E -- the energy of the photon decreases."
The doppler effect describes the relationship between frequency of the emitted light and the motion of the source. But the photons didn't start at a higher frequency and then decrease, rather they were emitted with less energy to start with because of the motion of the source.
"The Timmies had a line that stretched to nearly the Starbucks. The Starbucks had one guy in a really nice suit talking on his phone."
I think that all this proves that in the attempt to be non-conformist, you become conformist.
"I also noted that 80% of the people in the smoking room were sporting a fresh Tim Hortons coffee, large double double, myself included."
Hmmm... well, cigarette smoke smells like ass. and supposedly taste is 90% based on the sense of smell. So one might extrapolate that person's sense of smell/taste (i.e. prefers ass) to their choice of coffee.
Re:You know, he's doing a bayesian survey
on
Google IPO Swami
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"First of all, most people who enter the contest won't be experts like the pilots of your example."
experts don't determine prices in the stock market. The irrational public does.
"How about this: Each card will recieve a number of scanlines to process according to it's strength"
It might be polygonal based too. If they added a third frame buffer that was fed output from the other two cards, and then rastered on the screen, they would have a lot of flexibility in how they comingled the cards. Latency would be a big issue though.
I think it is great that a company has the will to do something like this, even if it doesn't catch on. It's cool to try something new, instead of just hanging back and doing the tried and true.
I'll admit I haven't yet read the whole article, but even though it says that it isn't tied to any one video card, that doesn't say to me that it can have multiple disparate cards. If it is doing something along the lines of SLI, I would guess that the speeds would need to be matched between the two cards. And that would imply having two of the same card, whatever card the user chooses.
But maybe not... maybe it's the advent of asymetric multi video processing.
Excuse me, I normally don't just barge into a conversation like this, but I was wondering if the moderators reading this thread would mind bumping me up a bit. You see, I don't have very good karma at the moment, and rather than try to post some useless link in the hopes that someone may mistake me for being informative or even insightful (ridiculous as that may seem), I thought I'd just go ahead and ask directly for points.
No offense, but the fact that someone would suggest that the little yellow line on televised football games and touch-tone phones make up for the lack of commercial space flight is a good sign of exactly how lame the 21st century is turning out to be.
Maybe you should get off your lazy ass and start doing something instead of waiting around for everyone else to do it for you.
Slashdot Mirror
'pick and drop' sounds terrible. They should call it 'pick and place'
I'm trying to understand this desire to represent mundane computing tasks with real world analogies. It strikes me as cool too, but I couldn't tell you why.
It seems like we're reaching for the goal of a virtual world where you would craft something in this virtual world that would be a program, instead of the reverse where you craft a program to represent something in a virtual world. So instead of coding a firewall and representing it with a moat around your virtual castle, you would instruct your minions to dig a moat which would result in a firewall being constructed. But that requires a creative intelligence in the software, so instead we are stuck with fairly pathetic simulations that tickle this urge and make us want more.
It's cool to look at a simulation depicting your web traffic, and knowing that kid with a slingshot is a script kiddie, but you are still relying on somebody else's program to interpret your logs. To take an idea expressed in 'The Matrix', to see what is really going on, you have to look at the raw data.
You geeks need a dictionary:
archaeology
\Ar`ch[ae]*ol"o*gy\, n. [Gr. ?; 'archai^os ancient (fr. 'archh` beginning) + ? discourse, ? to speak.] The science or study of antiquities, esp. prehistoric antiquities, such as the remains of buildings or monuments of an early epoch, inscriptions, implements, and other relics, written manuscripts, etc.
science
\Sci"ence\, n. [F., fr. L. scientia, fr. sciens, -entis, p. pr. of scire to know. Cf. Conscience, Conscious, Nice.] 1. Knowledge; knowledge of principles and causes; ascertained truth of facts.
" and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Not sure about Mozilla, but that certainly explains IE's memory problems"
That is just mean. I can't believe you would ridicule a man for suffering from a disease.
As an ASIC designer who has worked on chips for the large systems like Sun makes, I can tell you from first hand experience that you don't "slap together" these hardware systems.
I hate replying to anonymous posts because it feels like I'm talking to a wall. But on the odd chance that you might read a reply, and for the edification of anyone else who cares, I'll post a retort.
I don't know how this topic got so side-railed, but I said it before and I'll say it again, I was talking about systems, not silicon. Okay?
I was replying in the context of the quote from sun saying "We have hardware, storage, services and support". Good grief, who doesn't? Is it that hard to build a raid box? No. Is it that hard to build a workstation? No. Heck, I can go to compusa and get a dual G5 for less money than this HP PA-RISC workstation under my desk, and it would make the HP look like a glorified print server.
Gee whiz, your an ASIC designer. Guess what? So am I. How 'bout them apples.
Anyone can churn out software at little or no cost, building a FAB is an plant entirely different matter
Well, I was talking about systems, not silicon. But even with that argument, there are some tremendously fast FPGAs out there, and you can even get open source RISC cpu cores from here.
So you don't need a FAB to build a CPU. The resources (that would be the legos I mentioned) are all out there.
Addressing the question of how Sun plans to make money with an open-source Solaris, he simply said that Sun doesn't have to rely on only the operating system. "We have hardware, storage, services and support. What we are doing is taking that whole thing and selling that whole thing," he said.
This looks like the exact opposite approach of Apple, who makes really cool closed source software to sell their hardware.
It seems to me that it's pretty easy to slap together hardware systems, but developing software systems is a little more daunting of a task. In hardware, it's like putting legos together.
Software tries to do that too, but everybody and their brother tries to make a better lego, and so you end up with millions of incompatible partial solutions that are very difficult to build up into a complete solution.
PCI-X and PCI Express are not the same protocol. PCI-X is still a 32/64 bit parallel bus that handles FIFOs a little differently than PCI (i.e. the master can transmit unless the target has enough fifo for a complete transaction). It also changes the timing of the bus to allow for speeds up to 133MHz.
PCI Express is a serial protocol.
"I just don't seem to understand why people just can't go watch a movie to watch a movie these days."
I'd like to... and occasionally I get the chance. The last movie I saw that didn't seem to have any real political motivations was "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" And I really enjoyed it.
I haven't seen "The Day After Tomorrow", and I actually don't even know if its been released yet, but I'm pretty sure it's a 'message' movie. I'd rather go see a movie for entertainment than for education. Stick it on the sci-fi channel or discovery or whatever, and I'd be more prone to watch it.
Actually I thought I would give the journal a try. have a look if you are bored.
I don't use it myself, but it seems that slashot's journal is essentially a free blog.
"I fixed up my pastor's PC, and in return he has saved my eternal soul. "
I know this is a joke, but I still feel compelled to say that only God can 'save' you. No pastor or priest or anyone else on earth can do it.
" It ain't bragging if you can do it."
According to Websters: Brag--To glorify oneself in speech; talk in a self-admiring way
It has nothing to do with whether or not you are lying.
"it's just the loudmouth conservative wackos who perpetuate the stereotype that a Christian believes the world is four thousand years old."
Unfortunately, most people who call themselves Christians aren't. Being a Christian means that you have received Christ, and a virtue of having done this means that you are able to believe the Bible is the true and inerrant word of God. To people who have not received Christ, the Bible appears to be ridiculous nonsense.
According to the geneologies in the Bible, the earth is about 6000 years old.
And I'm sure that seems totally preposterous to just about everyone on slashdot. But surely the scientific minds of most slashdotters must realize that everything they know is taken on faith.
A quick example of this would be the concept of solipsism. Take a look here. Roughly speaking, solipsism is the idea that everything around you is a construct of your mind and doesn't necessarily exist. I guess this is a little like the idea used in The Matrix. As of yet, it's impossible to prove this idea false. So you have to take it on faith that it isn't true.
"Doesn't the Doppler shift reduce the frequency of the light? In that case as f drops so does E -- the energy of the photon decreases."
The doppler effect describes the relationship between frequency of the emitted light and the motion of the source. But the photons didn't start at a higher frequency and then decrease, rather they were emitted with less energy to start with because of the motion of the source.
"The Timmies had a line that stretched to nearly the Starbucks. The Starbucks had one guy in a really nice suit talking on his phone."
I think that all this proves that in the attempt to be non-conformist, you become conformist.
"I also noted that 80% of the people in the smoking room were sporting a fresh Tim Hortons coffee, large double double, myself included."
Hmmm... well, cigarette smoke smells like ass. and supposedly taste is 90% based on the sense of smell. So one might extrapolate that person's sense of smell/taste (i.e. prefers ass) to their choice of coffee.
"First of all, most people who enter the contest won't be experts like the pilots of your example."
experts don't determine prices in the stock market. The irrational public does.
"How about this:
Each card will recieve a number of scanlines to process according to it's strength"
It might be polygonal based too. If they added a third frame buffer that was fed output from the other two cards, and then rastered on the screen, they would have a lot of flexibility in how they comingled the cards. Latency would be a big issue though.
"You can use the same technique for multiple card in the same box."
Yes, but wouldn't you still need extra hardware to merge the display of these multiple cards to a single monitor?
I think it is great that a company has the will to do something like this, even if it doesn't catch on. It's cool to try something new, instead of just hanging back and doing the tried and true.
I'll admit I haven't yet read the whole article, but even though it says that it isn't tied to any one video card, that doesn't say to me that it can have multiple disparate cards. If it is doing something along the lines of SLI, I would guess that the speeds would need to be matched between the two cards. And that would imply having two of the same card, whatever card the user chooses.
But maybe not... maybe it's the advent of asymetric multi video processing.
Microsoft releases betas. You can download the 64bit version of Windows XP, and it's good for a year.
click here for the beta
Excuse me, I normally don't just barge into a conversation like this, but I was wondering if the moderators reading this thread would mind bumping me up a bit. You see, I don't have very good karma at the moment, and rather than try to post some useless link in the hopes that someone may mistake me for being informative or even insightful (ridiculous as that may seem), I thought I'd just go ahead and ask directly for points.
As in most people who are murdered are killed
Yes, yes, that is indeed some impressive logic.
... have told me (obviously idiots like me)...
I don't think I'd go around telling people things like: "idiots like me"
No offense, but the fact that someone would suggest that the little yellow line on televised football games and touch-tone phones make up for the lack of commercial space flight is a good sign of exactly how lame the 21st century is turning out to be.
Maybe you should get off your lazy ass and start doing something instead of waiting around for everyone else to do it for you.