I have great respect for you being in the military.
However, I have to ask: What do they do with the guys who were addicted to things like Tribes? (When *playing* Tribes, its all too fun to shoot a few spinfusors at a teammate, particularly one who is standing still)
I wonder if skiing or rocket jumping works in these simulations... [Yes, I realize this is far beside the point, but it brings up some amusing ideas].... Seems like people who are used to shooting+strafing+turning all at the same time might have some advantage....
It's so sad that people put up with such instability from their OS and applications.
Indeed. Does anyone remember the ComAir (0wned by Delta) fiasco that happened near Christmas 2004?
I believe it went like this:: Delta's scheduling and plane management computers needed to be rebooted periodically due to some kind of memory leak / other programmer error. [There were also/. discussions that their sceduling algorithm was O(stupidly bad) ] Rather than fix the error, they just adopted regular restarting of this system as regular operating procedure. Well, one day someone forgot to reboot.
I believe the number was something like thousands of travelers were stranded, flights canceled, delays... Things were really screwed up for ~3 days before Christmas eve or something like that.
THe fact that Microsoft managed to say in business and keep its marketshare after Win95 is only further proof that people are only too willing to tolerate things they really shouldn't be.
To me, there is just something inherently wrong with a "mobile phone" having a 3D Graphics card... Isn't the purpose of a phone to allow one to *talk* to other people?
Or in the 1960s, did people expect their rotary phone to make breakfast and wash the dishes too????
I suspect the peace that prevailed during the 2000 and 2004 elections occured more due to ignorance rather than by informed tolerance. People will riot in LA because one man was mis-treated by the police, yet there was no-riot in our *democracy* being blantly mis-treaded and manipulated (by diebold)??? It is sadly amusing that Clinton was nearly impeached for having a little fun during business hours.
Look at where most of the oil goes: energy/heating and transportation. So why do we continue to waste it? Even the recent Lexus commercial seems to make fun at all the attempts at electric cars in their effort to advertise their gas-guzzling "hybrid" SUV. If we adopted the European sensibility and transportation systems, we could reduce gasoline consumption by 75%, and be independent of the OPEC, etc, etc.
Yes, oil consumption is rising exponentially, so some might argue that a few cutbacks won't buy much time.. But I fear the world will work itself into such a frenzy that countries will be obliterated (perhaps economically) before the remaining oil/new energy sources is/are found.
I saw an interesting exhibit in Houston museum. It talked about the measures we were taking to save energy, be environmentally-friendly, etc. One item talked about a novel concept in california, where special lanes were designed exclusively for "vehicles carrying more than one person".
WHY is the concept of carrying more than 1 person inside a 5000lb SUV/ 4x4 Truck, etc such a novel concept??? WHY??? WHY?????????
Hate to break some painful news to you, but "24-bit" RBG refers to each color getting 8bits -- an UNSIGNED INTEGER value.
No floating point involved -- at all...
Now for 3D Graphics, coordinates may be represented in floating point. But during rendering, the values are converted to 8-bit integer values for Red, Green, and Blue components of each pixel.
And financial calculations are computed using INTEGER arithemetic....
A lot of things that might appear to require floating point, can often be implemented using "fixed-point" integer arithmetic (VERY accurately). They advantage of the latter is reduced hardware cost, increased speed, and lower power consumption.
Do you think a celluar phone performs the voice compression in floating point? Nope!
Unfortunately, these "conservatives" aren't conserving much...
Wasting lives, liberties, oil, money, and paper.
These "conservatives" carpet-bombed TWO countries in TWO years, and balooned the national debt.
I typically believe in small governement, reduced spending, etc, etc... Which is why I voted for Kerry -- a liberal???. Something really, really wrong is going on here.
The benefits of such an endeavor have the be a lot less abstract to be worth the waste.
I agree completely... One should consider the society generating these ideas:
Where a sandwich is bigger than a shoe...
Where a 5-8 passenger car is usually holds only 1.
Where a "4x4 extended-cab offroad truck" is used to transport a single overweight individual to work each day.
Where 12 gallon kitchen trash bags are considered to be relatively small to their outdoor counterparts.
Where advertisements for electrical devices promote how much power they waste (such as vacuum cleaners)
Where the popular music of many sub-cultures espouses greed, waste, and debauchery.
Where people have large grass lawns, and irrigate them with **potable water**.
In this context, it doesn't surprise me that many people enthusiastically envisioned the actual construction and operation of space-colonies, fed by a constant stream of supplies from Earth.
BTW, yes I'm American ( for many, many, many generations ). I like my country. I just wish some aspects of our culture would change a little...
I recently read a review in a Ziff-Davis publication that praised HTPC / Mini-ITX PC as containing "no moving parts". Sadly, the article's photo was a direct shot of the motherboard and power supply, with an extremely notice **fan** on the power supply. (And yes, the PSU did come with the item being reviewed)
I can only conclude that the "reviewer" never even physically saw the item he "reviewed".
Go to www.homedepot.com and enter "747028900263" in the search window. (This is a UPC code).
It brings up a "Resources Conservation" showerhead that puts out 2.5 gallons per minute. Multiply that by 15 minutes and you are looking at 37.5 gallons, nearly 8X the bucket I described. Others have the same rating. And I believe these are "low flow" heads... The ones in older construction used up to 10 GPM... See this link for more info. These are the kind that make your skin raw by the time one leaves...
And this is to say nothing of how much electric power is required for heating... 40 gallons is about 200 kg worth of water... Consider that it takes 4.184 J to heat 1g of water 1 degree Celsius, and I estimate that approximately 5 Kw-h of energy is used PER SHOWERING (assuming an outdoor temp of 60 deg F and water temp 100 deg F). Which means two people showering once daily will use about 300 KW-H per month... (My total usage on my apartment's electric bill is about 500-800 KW-h and I run the heater/AC often).
The previous paragraph lends some wait to conclude that most of the energy is wasted (due to excess water usage). And considering how often people shower, number of people doing this, etc, etc, quite a large amount of energy & water is truely wasted just due to a lifestyle!!!!!
And I did not mention that in other countries, people tend to not shower as often in the winter (for obvious reasons).
After a recent visit to India, I'm now convinced that +90% of westerers (myself included) could be classified as decadent:
Previously, I thought "western decadence" described the hi-profile movie stars, etc with their dozen cars, mansions, etc....
Now I realize that even "common" society is extremely decadent:
Running the HOT water continuously for a 10-15 minute shower. In India, I realized that a 5 gallon bucket was more enough water to comfortably bathe.
Heating/air-conditioning an entire house/business/etc... In India, people just wear an extra sweater/coat indoors. (In the US, I have personally seen my neighbors use their A/C in the winter!!!)
Getting a cup of coffee from a coffee shop. A styro-foam/paper cup, plastic lid, sugar packet, stirrer, and napkin are all used once and quickly discarded, despite the ancient invention known as the "mug". This is a daily (or even 2-3x per day) ritual for millions... (Do the math)
A fully able 20-30yr old driving a 5000 lb truck 1 mile to get groceries on a pleasant spring day... (Why is even walking a mile without carrying anything so unthinkable?)
Living in the suburbs... Why must we try to live as far as possible away from our place of work, our kids school, etc???
Mass postal-mail marketing... In the US, the amount of paper wasted on credit-card offers is absolutely staggering. Even worse, I receive a "newspaper" about a full inch of pure advertisements about once month (and everyone else in my apartment complex for that matter)
Potable water used for everything... In the US people take it for granted that the water that comes from the tap is safe to drink... Consider how little of that water is actually used for drinking/cooking and how much goes to watering the yard, washing the car, bathing, industrial uses, etc...
Having a need for a large trash-can... In India, I personally witnessed a family of 6 generating about one small sandwich-bag worth of trash per day... Yet somehow, I manage to generate a 44Litre bag of trash a couple of times a week (and I live by myself!)
Transporting groceries in paper/plastic bags... In some parts of Asia, these bags are banned by the government (too much litter) and people carry a large canvas-like bag [with handle] ("jute bags") for shopping... That is, they RE-USE the bag and keep it.
Sadly, most of these are not soley the activities of the ultra-rich nor even of the upper-middle class... I'm not saying there aren't some "decadent" activities going on in India nor do they have all the answers...
I used to always think that the rich doctors, lawyers, etc (in the US) lived the unattainable "wealthy lifestyle"... I realize now that even the minimum-wage workers at Mc Donalds enjoy many luxuries that even the "upper-class" groups in most of the world (in terms of pop.) do not have.
Unfortunately, what I'm trying to show is that even the masses are living highly decadent lives (and they probably don't know it). And I think most of the items I listed would be considred normal (as opposed to other excesses which might be less obvious)
Yes, even by decadent western standards, I consider "pop culture" to be extremely (even more) decadent... They should have been fed to the lions (figuratively), but somehow society seems to embrace them in a strange way.
my point is the trend exists because manufactures feel they must maintain it... They do not aim higher, they do not aim lower, they do not even question the need for such increases.
Why does the media insist on using the term "Moore's Law"???
Since when do self-fufilling prophesies become law?
Self-fufilling prophesies tend to restict one's actions rather than sustain them.... Which is why superstition is harmful....
If every PHB believes in Moore's quip, then do people get fired for not doubling # transistors every 18 months? Do they get a bonus for doubling the # of transistors in 17 months?
Perhaps if they weren't so darn busy cramming more transistors on the chip, they could better improve their compiler or come up with truly innovative architectural techiques that *work*....
They generally show up as very low or very high frequency noise distributed more or less uniformly around the origin.
What exactly do you mean by "high freq. noise...distributed around the origin?" (Origin = 0hz, right)? Amplitude plots of images in the freq domain will always be symmetric since the 'input' is 'real'.
I thought most un-altered images would have strong low-frequency components (as the image is likely to have some "average" intensity that is non-zero). Perhaps the lack of high-frequency noise in a specific (non-white) area could indicate re-touching/blurring since photographs often have a little thermal and/or quantizaion noise in them.
This has been done by HAMS (amateur radio operators) for at least ~10 years. Its called APRS, and uses small inexpensive handheld radios, a packet modem, and a GPS.. (and some handhelds even have the packet modem built-in). Weather stations can also interface to this.
There is a nation/world-wide network of stations that use the internet (and/or HF radio) as a backbone. There is even a webpage that will display a user's location on a map (can't remember the URL offhand). There are even specific frequencies reserved just for this purpose.
And this is all completely free... (except the equipment).
Do you pat yourself on the back for choosing "B" since killing a few people is less bad than killing a lot?
Despite the options available, I would be inclined to create my own "C) Find a better alternative"
Yes, this argument is a bit extreme and slightly idealistic..., but such ideals are powerful source of social change....
The concept of "non-violent protest" seems insane (and highly idealistic) when it is directed against a powerful armed & dangerous entity... But recent (world) history shows it has been extremely powerful in many different circumstances.
Google appears to have chosen the lesser of two evils... But it still directly choose to do some evil...
Consider the purpose of a "search engine" -- to help people find information. It seems highly ironic that a "search engine"'s business model would rely on making a fair amount of information unattainable by the customers.
What doctor would purposely refuse patients that he was capable of treating? What cable television operator would choose not to make available highly desirable channels/content? What newspaper would exist by not reporting the news? What book publisher would exist by not publishing important/desirable books?
Well, ah crap, considering the last three items, we really do live in *interesting* times.
Slashdot Mirror
I have great respect for you being in the military.
However, I have to ask: What do they do with the guys who were addicted to things like Tribes?
(When *playing* Tribes, its all too fun to shoot a few spinfusors at a teammate, particularly one who is standing still)
I wonder if skiing or rocket jumping works in these simulations... [Yes, I realize this is far beside the point, but it brings up some amusing ideas].... Seems like people who are used to shooting+strafing+turning all at the same time might have some advantage....
It's so sad that people put up with such instability from their OS and applications.
/. discussions that their sceduling algorithm was O(stupidly bad) ] Rather than fix the error, they just adopted regular restarting of this system as regular operating procedure. Well, one day someone forgot to reboot.
Indeed. Does anyone remember the ComAir (0wned by Delta) fiasco that happened near Christmas 2004?
I believe it went like this:: Delta's scheduling and plane management computers needed to be rebooted periodically due to some kind of memory leak / other programmer error. [There were also
I believe the number was something like thousands of travelers were stranded, flights canceled, delays... Things were really screwed up for ~3 days before Christmas eve or something like that.
THe fact that Microsoft managed to say in business and keep its marketshare after Win95 is only further proof that people are only too willing to tolerate things they really shouldn't be.
Great...
Now all we need is a "RAID" array (Redundant array of inexpensive devils) of roaches to guard against at a Raid attack....
To me, there is just something inherently wrong with a "mobile phone" having a 3D Graphics card... Isn't the purpose of a phone to allow one to *talk* to other people?
Or in the 1960s, did people expect their rotary phone to make breakfast and wash the dishes too????
Wouldn't such technologies suffer the same problems that people/animals face in hazardous/hostile environments?
What happens when a bio-sensor based robot walks into a cloud of chlorine gas? (e.g. chemical plant explosion/fire).
What about high-temperature environments?
What about cold/icy ones (e.g. avalanche)?
Radioactive areas? (e.g. dirty-bomb explosion)
Biological agents (viruses, pollen, etc)?
Wouldn't it also be difficult to maintain live cells in a machine? (e.g. what about food, water, oxygen, etc)?
I doubt that MS would even stoop so low. Oh they will.. For this one case, Intel happened to beat them to it.
LOL. I wonder if that Billboard is in north Austin toward Round Rock....
Since Centaur is based in Austin, it makes sense. Unfortunately, the general public would probably think the C7 is some newfangled airplane.
I suspect the peace that prevailed during the 2000 and 2004 elections occured more due to ignorance rather than by informed tolerance. People will riot in LA because one man was mis-treated by the police, yet there was no-riot in our *democracy* being blantly mis-treaded and manipulated (by diebold)??? It is sadly amusing that Clinton was nearly impeached for having a little fun during business hours.
Look at where most of the oil goes: energy/heating and transportation. So why do we continue to waste it? Even the recent Lexus commercial seems to make fun at all the attempts at electric cars in their effort to advertise their gas-guzzling "hybrid" SUV. If we adopted the European sensibility and transportation systems, we could reduce gasoline consumption by 75%, and be independent of the OPEC, etc, etc.
Yes, oil consumption is rising exponentially, so some might argue that a few cutbacks won't buy much time.. But I fear the world will work itself into such a frenzy that countries will be obliterated (perhaps economically) before the remaining oil/new energy sources is/are found.
I saw an interesting exhibit in Houston museum. It talked about the measures we were taking to save energy, be environmentally-friendly, etc. One item talked about a novel concept in california, where special lanes were designed exclusively for "vehicles carrying more than one person".
WHY is the concept of carrying more than 1 person inside a 5000lb SUV/ 4x4 Truck, etc such a novel concept??? WHY??? WHY?????????
Hate to break some painful news to you, but "24-bit" RBG refers to each color getting 8bits -- an UNSIGNED INTEGER value.
No floating point involved -- at all...
Now for 3D Graphics, coordinates may be represented in floating point. But during rendering, the values are converted to 8-bit integer values for Red, Green, and Blue components of each pixel.
And financial calculations are computed using INTEGER arithemetic....
A lot of things that might appear to require floating point, can often be implemented using "fixed-point" integer arithmetic (VERY accurately). They advantage of the latter is reduced hardware cost, increased speed, and lower power consumption.
Do you think a celluar phone performs the voice compression in floating point? Nope!
Unfortunately, these "conservatives" aren't conserving much...
Wasting lives, liberties, oil, money, and paper.
These "conservatives" carpet-bombed TWO countries in TWO years, and balooned the national debt.
I typically believe in small governement, reduced spending, etc, etc... Which is why I voted for Kerry -- a liberal???. Something really, really wrong is going on here.
I agree completely...
One should consider the society generating these ideas:
In this context, it doesn't surprise me that many people enthusiastically envisioned the actual construction and operation of space-colonies, fed by a constant stream of supplies from Earth.
BTW, yes I'm American ( for many, many, many generations ). I like my country. I just wish some aspects of our culture would change a little...
Problems and needs are naturally occurring things.
They take on unforeseen forms with non-standard characteristics.
Are you talking about the "known unknowns" and the "unknown unknowns" ????
What qualifies as journalism nowadays?
"Journalism"??? You mis-spelled advertisement...
I recently read a review in a Ziff-Davis publication that praised HTPC / Mini-ITX PC as containing "no moving parts". Sadly, the article's photo was a direct shot of the motherboard and power supply, with an extremely notice **fan** on the power supply. (And yes, the PSU did come with the item being reviewed)
I can only conclude that the "reviewer" never even physically saw the item he "reviewed".
Well, if we stopped worrying about the planet, then a large number of people would start thinking about other things, such as politics...
Which means the government's actions might actually be scrutinized by the general public...
Which means something very &*^(*&%%%%%%%%%%%
NO CARRIER
I particularly love it when "top" itself is consuming 99% of the CPU...
I've seen this while running it as root
[/me ducks for cover at the flame war over whether top should be run as root or not]
Do you work if you get removed from engineering?
Well, if you take the engineering out of the engineer, what's left?
A manager!
Sun??? Sun???
Nah, they just mis-spelled "CRT Monitor"
So would the targeted person be able to read the written offer before the warhead detonated?
Does that mean that someone in Ira?, upon finding an undetonated warhead, could obtain its GPLed source code via the written offer?
After all, how likely is it that the US military will go three years without shootting something at someone somewhere?
Well, here's my homework:
Go to www.homedepot.com and enter "747028900263" in the search window. (This is a UPC code).
It brings up a "Resources Conservation" showerhead that puts out 2.5 gallons per minute. Multiply that by 15 minutes and you are looking at 37.5 gallons, nearly 8X the bucket I described. Others have the same rating. And I believe these are "low flow" heads... The ones in older construction used up to 10 GPM... See this link for more info. These are the kind that make your skin raw by the time one leaves...
And this is to say nothing of how much electric power is required for heating... 40 gallons is about 200 kg worth of water... Consider that it takes 4.184 J to heat 1g of water 1 degree Celsius, and I estimate that approximately 5 Kw-h of energy is used PER SHOWERING (assuming an outdoor temp of 60 deg F and water temp 100 deg F). Which means two people showering once daily will use about 300 KW-H per month... (My total usage on my apartment's electric bill is about 500-800 KW-h and I run the heater/AC often).
The previous paragraph lends some wait to conclude that most of the energy is wasted (due to excess water usage). And considering how often people shower, number of people doing this, etc, etc, quite a large amount of energy & water is truely wasted just due to a lifestyle!!!!!
And I did not mention that in other countries, people tend to not shower as often in the winter (for obvious reasons).
Previously, I thought "western decadence" described the hi-profile movie stars, etc with their dozen cars, mansions, etc....
Now I realize that even "common" society is extremely decadent:
Sadly, most of these are not soley the activities of the ultra-rich nor even of the upper-middle class... I'm not saying there aren't some "decadent" activities going on in India nor do they have all the answers...
I used to always think that the rich doctors, lawyers, etc (in the US) lived the unattainable "wealthy lifestyle"... I realize now that even the minimum-wage workers at Mc Donalds enjoy many luxuries that even the "upper-class" groups in most of the world (in terms of pop.) do not have.
Unfortunately, what I'm trying to show is that even the masses are living highly decadent lives (and they probably don't know it). And I think most of the items I listed would be considred normal (as opposed to other excesses which might be less obvious)
Yes, even by decadent western standards, I consider "pop culture" to be extremely (even more) decadent... They should have been fed to the lions (figuratively), but somehow society seems to embrace them in a strange way.
my point is the trend exists because manufactures feel they must maintain it... They do not aim higher, they do not aim lower, they do not even question the need for such increases.
Why does the media insist on using the term "Moore's Law"???
Since when do self-fufilling prophesies become law?
Self-fufilling prophesies tend to restict one's actions rather than sustain them.... Which is why superstition is harmful....
If every PHB believes in Moore's quip, then do people get fired for not doubling # transistors every 18 months? Do they get a bonus for doubling the # of transistors in 17 months?
Perhaps if they weren't so darn busy cramming more transistors on the chip, they could better improve their compiler or come up with truly innovative architectural techiques that *work*....
They generally show up as very low or very high frequency noise distributed more or less uniformly around the origin.
...distributed around the origin?" (Origin = 0hz, right)? Amplitude plots of images in the freq domain will always be symmetric since the 'input' is 'real'.
What exactly do you mean by "high freq. noise
I thought most un-altered images would have strong low-frequency components (as the image is likely to have some "average" intensity that is non-zero). Perhaps the lack of high-frequency noise in a specific (non-white) area could indicate re-touching/blurring since photographs often have a little thermal and/or quantizaion noise in them.
This has been done by HAMS (amateur radio operators) for at least ~10 years. Its called APRS, and uses small inexpensive handheld radios, a packet modem, and a GPS.. (and some handhelds even have the packet modem built-in). Weather stations can also interface to this.
There is a nation/world-wide network of stations that use the internet (and/or HF radio) as a backbone. There is even a webpage that will display a user's location on a map (can't remember the URL offhand). There are even specific frequencies reserved just for this purpose.
And this is all completely free... (except the equipment).
You have to be careful with such arguments...
What if someone gave you a choice:
A) Kill 1000 people
B) Kill 2 people
Do you pat yourself on the back for choosing "B" since killing a few people is less bad than killing a lot?
Despite the options available, I would be inclined to create my own "C) Find a better alternative"
Yes, this argument is a bit extreme and slightly idealistic..., but such ideals are powerful source of social change....
The concept of "non-violent protest" seems insane (and highly idealistic) when it is directed against a powerful armed & dangerous entity... But recent (world) history shows it has been extremely powerful in many different circumstances.
Google appears to have chosen the lesser of two evils... But it still directly choose to do some evil...
Consider the purpose of a "search engine" -- to help people find information. It seems highly ironic that a "search engine"'s business model would rely on making a fair amount of information unattainable by the customers.
What doctor would purposely refuse patients that he was capable of treating?
What cable television operator would choose not to make available highly desirable channels/content?
What newspaper would exist by not reporting the news?
What book publisher would exist by not publishing important/desirable books?
Well, ah crap, considering the last three items, we really do live in *interesting* times.