Ignorant people ALWAYS say things like this. Sorry, but no matter how long you shake a box of parts, a working computer will not come out of it. Putting chemicals into water and mixing it will never result in anything beyond a few simple amino acids. Work in labs on simulating "primordial ooze" clearly shows this to be a fact.
The simplest forms of life require many complex amino acids in complicated arrangements all working together. One single protein is usually a chain of hundreds to thousands of amino acids in a very specific sequence. No amount of mixing will ever result in one, much less the hundreds of proteins and enzymes needed to make a single celled organism.
THAT is why they make theories about life coming from the stars. The "primordial soup" theory is so much bunk.
No you don't. If you check, all those words that we spell with "or" instead of "our" are all French. Humor, honor, color... all old French, and of latin root.
A considerable number of patents have been issued for common 3D operations. For example, using polar coordinates for 3D camera operations is patented. What scares the 3D companies is the fact that they probably violate a hundred different bogus patents. If they release specs for their chip, these patent holders may came forward and start demanding money. Even if they are bogus, it'll cost many millions to fight.
Look at what happened to MS - they had to release specs on VC1 to get it into running as a codec for HD-DVDs. Once they did, more than a dozen companies popped out of the woodwork claiming VC1 violated patents they held. THAT is what keeps nVidia and ATI (and everyone else) from making specs or code available for the cards.
Until the patent madness ends, don't expect anyone to release any specs or code.
So don't open source the drivers, just make the specs for the chip available. This gives the user a choice - closed source drivers that are state of the art (supposedly), or open source drivers that probably aren't as advanced, but are under constant improvement.
Actually, the Engineer is having trouble keeping his BULLSHIT meter from pegging. After all, an engineer has to make something the really exists and works. The mathematician and physicist are free to bullshit all they want.
Mathematicians and physicists are con-artists with a brain. Those with scruples and a conscious become engineers instead.
E: Give me $10M and I'll give you a product that will make you $100M.
M: Give me $10M and I'll give you a theory that will give everyone else a migraine.
God Damn! Modern "scientists" piss me off! Look at this quote:
Joseph Silk of the University of Oxford, UK, and his co-workers say that these extra spatial dimensions can be inferred from the perplexing behaviour of dark matter.
What? Our calculations are off? The readings don't match our predictions? No, we can't POSSIBLY be wrong. After all, I just measured gravity in my lab the other day, and I'm sure I took at least 10 data points and wrote the measurements down to two decimal places. My equation got REALLY CLOSE to most of those points, so it MUST be correct, even when talking about TRILLIONS of stars TRILLIONS of light-years away!
Jesus tap-dancing Christ! Can't they just admit they don't have a fucking clue about it?
Which is more likely?
A - "Dark matter" you can't see or detect in any manner is affecting a whole DAMN GALAXY a trillion light-years away in such a manner that six undetectable dimensions JUST HAPPEN to make your equations work.
B - Your theory of gravity is just that - a theory. One which isn't correct when talking about galaxies worth of matter trillions of light-years away.
Let me tell you, if I had told a professor in college that my answer was right, but undetectable matter in three extra dimensions made it vary from his test key, he'd have laughed me out of the building. But I might have gotten an extra point for making him laugh.:)
Free neutrons only last 886 seconds (about 15 minutes) before decaying. If neutrons were a big problem, you'd need to stay about 16 minutes away from the sun (about 2 AU). That is assuming the neutron is doing almost the speed of light. I'm not sure what the distribution is of energy of neutrons generated by the sun, but probably the largest bulk of them aren't anywhere near lightspeed, so you're probably safe even here by the Earth.
That's what I've been telling people for the last five or six years. With the advances in genetic engineering, we'll soon be able to tailor make an organism which is part bacteria, part insect, and part redwood tree to make living spaceships.
It'll handle recycling waste products and air, and maybe even produce the food that astronauts need (grow fruit INSIDE the tree instead of outside). Of course, the ability to repair itself is a big plus.
You don't have to deflect it 90 degrees. Depending on how far out the field goes and the size of the craft, you may only have to deflect it one tenth of a degree to miss the craft.
Most estimates of a manned mission to Mars puts the total project cost at ten to twenty billion dollars. The Mars rover missions range from two hundred million to a half billion dollars. So you're looking at MAYBE fifty robots, not a thousand.
You other statements are so stupid they don't deserve a reply. Just idiotic political bashing.
As to whether it's worth it to advance manned space missions, just ask the dinosaurs.
It sounds funny when you put it that way, but it's the truth. Fuses and circuit breakers are not there to protect your electrical devices. They are there to protect the other people on the same power grid from your electrical devices. When you dump a soda on your TV set, the rest of the neighborhood doesn't go dark.
Incorrect. The same design takes the same amount of power to work regardless of size. As you shrink the size, you run into physical problems that FORCE you to decrease the power, even though it makes the design work WORSE (reduced error margins).
Prime example: electromigration of aluminum. As you decrease the size while keeping the applied voltage the same, Al atoms start to migrate - i.e., move in the applied field. After enough time passes, enough Al will have moved to create breaks in the line, or possibly shorts to other lines. There are two ways to combat this: decrease the voltage (which decreases the power), or use something else that requires higher voltage potential differences to migrate (more expensive). It's one of the prime reasons core voltages have dropped as transistors got smaller.
Well, you're HALF right. Coal won't cut glass, but diamond DOES lubricate (reduce friction). It's commonplace these days to diamond coat things to reduce their friction.
+5 Insightful? Guess the moderators don't know anything about QC (or physics in general). In quantum computing, the phrase "quantum" has NOTHING to do with size. It has to do with using quantum INTERACTIONS. Quantum devices are currently only slightly smaller than silicon transistors. Quantum devices CANNOT be smaller than a single atom. Most useable quantum devices cannot be smaller than 10 to 100 atoms. It is the quantum mechanical interactions between the atoms that quantum devices exploit.
Because we're overclocking 68060's. Duh. The 68060 kicked the Pentium's butt six ways from Sunday. It's too bad Motorola quit work on that and instead turned it into an embedded controller (ColdFire microcontroller family).
Heard on those audio tapes of the firemen trapped under the rubble released today: "HQ, can you hear me? It's as hot as an overclocked pentium in here!"
What? Not funny, you say? Flamebait, you say?.. odd how a similar comment about Hiroshima got modded to +5 funny
I thought it was funny. Besides, you haven't been modded down as not funny or flamebait.
No, he's pointing out the rat-fink fund the SEC maintains for stool pigeons. He hopes a SCO employee will rat out the execs for money. I hope so too.:)
Outsourcing is still too expensive! Just replace all patent examiners with rubber-stamp machines. Given that nearly all patents are approved anyway, replacing examiners with rubber-stamps will save a considerable amount of money, speed things up, allow for future growth, all while doing almost exactly the same thing as the human examiners did. If you wish to be really picky about it, just have the machines randomly reject one out of every ten applications. A random rejection will be about as sensical as the rejections you get from current examiners.
In other words, if someone doesn't know how to use software, they are stupid. This is a common sentiment on Slashdot. Why?
Because it's true. Seriously, little kids and doddering old coots use computers every day. There's no excuse at all for a lack of basic computer literacy beyond active disinterest or plain stupidity.
Where silence is golden is a home theater PC. HTPCs need to be a quiet as possible because many (most) movies these days have a very wide dynamic range.
When playing DVDs on my PC, I have to turn the sound up so I can hear the quiet parts over the noise of the computer, but then the loud parts are too loud. It helps to turn audio compression on, but it would be nicer with a quieter computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignorant people ALWAYS say things like this. Sorry, but no matter how long you shake a box of parts, a working computer will not come out of it. Putting chemicals into water and mixing it will never result in anything beyond a few simple amino acids. Work in labs on simulating "primordial ooze" clearly shows this to be a fact.
The simplest forms of life require many complex amino acids in complicated arrangements all working together. One single protein is usually a chain of hundreds to thousands of amino acids in a very specific sequence. No amount of mixing will ever result in one, much less the hundreds of proteins and enzymes needed to make a single celled organism.
THAT is why they make theories about life coming from the stars. The "primordial soup" theory is so much bunk.
No you don't. If you check, all those words that we spell with "or" instead of "our" are all French. Humor, honor, color... all old French, and of latin root.
A considerable number of patents have been issued for common 3D operations. For example, using polar coordinates for 3D camera operations is patented. What scares the 3D companies is the fact that they probably violate a hundred different bogus patents. If they release specs for their chip, these patent holders may came forward and start demanding money. Even if they are bogus, it'll cost many millions to fight.
Look at what happened to MS - they had to release specs on VC1 to get it into running as a codec for HD-DVDs. Once they did, more than a dozen companies popped out of the woodwork claiming VC1 violated patents they held. THAT is what keeps nVidia and ATI (and everyone else) from making specs or code available for the cards.
Until the patent madness ends, don't expect anyone to release any specs or code.
So don't open source the drivers, just make the specs for the chip available. This gives the user a choice - closed source drivers that are state of the art (supposedly), or open source drivers that probably aren't as advanced, but are under constant improvement.
Actually, the Engineer is having trouble keeping his BULLSHIT meter from pegging. After all, an engineer has to make something the really exists and works. The mathematician and physicist are free to bullshit all they want.
Mathematicians and physicists are con-artists with a brain. Those with scruples and a conscious become engineers instead.
E: Give me $10M and I'll give you a product that will make you $100M.
M: Give me $10M and I'll give you a theory that will give everyone else a migraine.
God Damn! Modern "scientists" piss me off! Look at this quote:
:)
Joseph Silk of the University of Oxford, UK, and his co-workers say that these extra spatial dimensions can be inferred from the perplexing behaviour of dark matter.
What? Our calculations are off? The readings don't match our predictions? No, we can't POSSIBLY be wrong. After all, I just measured gravity in my lab the other day, and I'm sure I took at least 10 data points and wrote the measurements down to two decimal places. My equation got REALLY CLOSE to most of those points, so it MUST be correct, even when talking about TRILLIONS of stars TRILLIONS of light-years away!
Jesus tap-dancing Christ! Can't they just admit they don't have a fucking clue about it?
Which is more likely?
A - "Dark matter" you can't see or detect in any manner is affecting a whole DAMN GALAXY a trillion light-years away in such a manner that six undetectable dimensions JUST HAPPEN to make your equations work.
B - Your theory of gravity is just that - a theory. One which isn't correct when talking about galaxies worth of matter trillions of light-years away.
Let me tell you, if I had told a professor in college that my answer was right, but undetectable matter in three extra dimensions made it vary from his test key, he'd have laughed me out of the building. But I might have gotten an extra point for making him laugh.
Free neutrons only last 886 seconds (about 15 minutes) before decaying. If neutrons were a big problem, you'd need to stay about 16 minutes away from the sun (about 2 AU). That is assuming the neutron is doing almost the speed of light. I'm not sure what the distribution is of energy of neutrons generated by the sun, but probably the largest bulk of them aren't anywhere near lightspeed, so you're probably safe even here by the Earth.
That's what I've been telling people for the last five or six years. With the advances in genetic engineering, we'll soon be able to tailor make an organism which is part bacteria, part insect, and part redwood tree to make living spaceships.
It'll handle recycling waste products and air, and maybe even produce the food that astronauts need (grow fruit INSIDE the tree instead of outside). Of course, the ability to repair itself is a big plus.
You don't have to deflect it 90 degrees. Depending on how far out the field goes and the size of the craft, you may only have to deflect it one tenth of a degree to miss the craft.
Most estimates of a manned mission to Mars puts the total project cost at ten to twenty billion dollars. The Mars rover missions range from two hundred million to a half billion dollars. So you're looking at MAYBE fifty robots, not a thousand.
You other statements are so stupid they don't deserve a reply. Just idiotic political bashing.
As to whether it's worth it to advance manned space missions, just ask the dinosaurs.
We put those people into the military so they'd kill people in other countries rather than back home.
It sounds funny when you put it that way, but it's the truth. Fuses and circuit breakers are not there to protect your electrical devices. They are there to protect the other people on the same power grid from your electrical devices. When you dump a soda on your TV set, the rest of the neighborhood doesn't go dark.
Incorrect. The same design takes the same amount of power to work regardless of size. As you shrink the size, you run into physical problems that FORCE you to decrease the power, even though it makes the design work WORSE (reduced error margins).
Prime example: electromigration of aluminum. As you decrease the size while keeping the applied voltage the same, Al atoms start to migrate - i.e., move in the applied field. After enough time passes, enough Al will have moved to create breaks in the line, or possibly shorts to other lines. There are two ways to combat this: decrease the voltage (which decreases the power), or use something else that requires higher voltage potential differences to migrate (more expensive). It's one of the prime reasons core voltages have dropped as transistors got smaller.
Well, you're HALF right. Coal won't cut glass, but diamond DOES lubricate (reduce friction). It's commonplace these days to diamond coat things to reduce their friction.
+5 Insightful? Guess the moderators don't know anything about QC (or physics in general). In quantum computing, the phrase "quantum" has NOTHING to do with size. It has to do with using quantum INTERACTIONS. Quantum devices are currently only slightly smaller than silicon transistors. Quantum devices CANNOT be smaller than a single atom. Most useable quantum devices cannot be smaller than 10 to 100 atoms. It is the quantum mechanical interactions between the atoms that quantum devices exploit.
Because we're overclocking 68060's. Duh. The 68060 kicked the Pentium's butt six ways from Sunday. It's too bad Motorola quit work on that and instead turned it into an embedded controller (ColdFire microcontroller family).
Heard on those audio tapes of the firemen trapped under the rubble released today: "HQ, can you hear me? It's as hot as an overclocked pentium in here!"
What? Not funny, you say? Flamebait, you say?.. odd how a similar comment about Hiroshima got modded to +5 funny
I thought it was funny. Besides, you haven't been modded down as not funny or flamebait.
You ARE a prude. This is /. - if you want "considerate" posters, go to www.oldweeniepussies.com. ;)
No, he's pointing out the rat-fink fund the SEC maintains for stool pigeons. He hopes a SCO employee will rat out the execs for money. I hope so too. :)
At the rate MS is removing features from Vista, all we'll get is a blank CD when it ships.
Outsourcing is still too expensive! Just replace all patent examiners with rubber-stamp machines. Given that nearly all patents are approved anyway, replacing examiners with rubber-stamps will save a considerable amount of money, speed things up, allow for future growth, all while doing almost exactly the same thing as the human examiners did. If you wish to be really picky about it, just have the machines randomly reject one out of every ten applications. A random rejection will be about as sensical as the rejections you get from current examiners.
Damn! That's a great argument. Somebody mod this guy up!
In other words, if someone doesn't know how to use software, they are stupid. This is a common sentiment on Slashdot. Why?
Because it's true. Seriously, little kids and doddering old coots use computers every day. There's no excuse at all for a lack of basic computer literacy beyond active disinterest or plain stupidity.
So design the foam to peel off in big strips, then peel it off seconds before takeoff.
Where silence is golden is a home theater PC. HTPCs need to be a quiet as possible because many (most) movies these days have a very wide dynamic range.
When playing DVDs on my PC, I have to turn the sound up so I can hear the quiet parts over the noise of the computer, but then the loud parts are too loud. It helps to turn audio compression on, but it would be nicer with a quieter computer.