No, that's bullshit. That's willingly overlooking the original invention of the Internet and of personal computers. That's also overlooking the revolutionary consequences of the popularisation and eventual ubiquity of these. Over the last 15 years, personal computers and the Internet have profoundly changed the way we live and the way we do many things.
I for one am a great example of that. I don't have a TV, I don't make or receive telephone calls, I don't go to the movies, I don't own a video game console, I don't buy music, I don't read newspapers and I don't buy pornos because the Internet superseded all of that. Not only that, but I owe my practically flawless English (I'm French) to chatting with Americans on AIM ever since I was 15, I also learnt my job mostly on the Internet (I'm a mostly self-taught DSP dev), and to top it all off I'm a self-employed software dev who makes all of his income from software sales from all around the world. That didn't affect just "us", my uncle after being divorced fell in love with a woman in South America (not Mark Sanford) he "met" on MSN, and now he lives with her there. The Internet made him move to Colombia and marry a woman he never met before, out of the blue.
If you still fail to see how personal computers/the Internet have revolutionised things you're just blind. I'm not arguing that things are going faster or slower, I personally don't think that it means anything to talk about progress rate, and I even less believe that there is any sort of general trend, just sectors that get "bursts of progress" before stabilising. I find it silly to try to bring "progress of anything" into a unidimensional variable (but if anyone disagrees please give me a reading of your progress-speedometer.
Oh also, what progress wasn't "incremental"? There were steam automobiles in the late 18th century that could reach a few miles per hour. Airplanes are just gliders with a propeller, and manned gliders have flown since 875 A.D.. Telephones are just fancy eletrical telegraphs, television has evolved from so many different things (photography, radio, Nipkow disks, pantelegraphs...), and the Internet itself is just a fancy evolution of transoceanic electrical telegraphy (if you think about it, the worldwide telegraph network of the later part of the 19th century is very Internet-like). I don't see what can possibly be "non-incremental", nothing suddenly just "popped up" to cause a revolution. Many of those were centuries in the making.
It's not because what you expected didn't happen that things are going slower. People always make wild predictions, they fail to happen, and something that they had never thought about happens instead. Sorry, no flying car for you, here, have a multiplayer game of GTA IV with some a bunch of foreigners, or download and watch a movie with your pocket telephone.
Fast forward 30 years later: "Oh noes, we're nowhere near getting our Skynet/Singularity. You suck, ghost of Kurzweil! (Oh yeah, in the future we're totally getting devices to communicate with spirits, space aliens and other ethereal beings. You heard it here first!)"
A bit off-topic, but has science fiction dealt with such things as augmented reality in the eye? It just occurred to me that it could be interesting to explore the possibilities of people living in an augmented world where the most important stuff cannot be seen (like other people who might not be present and just "augmented", like holograms).
Although that would probably turn into just another dystopia future thingie, cause when you think about it, what are you going to do with a new tech as the basis of a story besides making shit go wrong?
What, that's the best you got? The first one is called politics, that's how things actually work. Inspiring ideals-filled speeches are great for getting the public opinion behind you, but when it comes to getting the job done, you have to get your hands dirty and compromise left and right to even get a faint shadow of what you promised to happen. If you compromise with a powerful lobby behind closed doors then you won't have to compromise in the bills you want to pass to keep them happy.
As for the RIAA lawyers, allow me to dismiss it as general lawyer-bashing. Lawyers do what they have to to win for whoever pays them. They were picked because they were good lawyers. It doesn't matter what they did before (as long as it was legal), lawyers are the military of the justice system, they'll shower your ass with legal napalm and white phosphorous to accomplish their mission.
Interesting, my main change in P2P habits is due to the fact that most of the stuff I want is on rapidshare or megaupload, so instead of searching on thepiratebay or eMule (which I hardly use anymore because of that), I search on filestube. I used to download torrents of entire seasons of TV shows, but now all I gotta do is find the episode I want on megaupload, and as soon as it starts downloading I start watching it by opening the.part file with VLC.
But as for the real cause of the difference between day and night, QoS? Seems obvious.. Nothing necessarily malicious coming from the ISPs, for one thing they're right to have QoS for more time-dependant traffic, and then if you yourself watch YouTube or download some files over HTTP then your P2P traffic is gonna take a hit.
Doesn't Windows do the same thing? I clearly recall being prevented from install Windows Me (I think) on a P133 because it didn't have 233 MHz or whatever. Same thing for XP iirc.
Also I don't know what's the reason, but I heard of some problems installing Leopard on 866 MHz machines. Might have to do with hardware support, i.e. they didn't want to keep on supporting the old hardware. It's just Apple's policy to be light on legacy support, I admit it's a bit annoying but it works for them.
I thought everyone knew that the gulf war syndrome was due to artillery shells encased in depleted uranium, or something like that (saw many documentaries on this a few years ago).
Obvious troll is obvious (or a dumbass, I'm not sure). Obviously they mean the OpenGL-based engine, not the whole damn thing down to the smallest chip.
Are you kidding? X-Plane can't even handle supersonic flight simulation properly. The flight model is seriously broken when it comes to supersonic flight, and it has no decent combat systems. It's a neat simulator for subsonic aircraft design, it's a good thing to use if you're a civil pilot, but it must fall short on so many things when it comes to what's needed here it's not even funny.
The problem would have solved itself a long time ago if the right way to say 2^30 sounded cooler than "gibi". No one's going to adopt that because it sounds lame, which is why the problem persists despite everyone knowing the solution (because no one likes the solution. A bit like IPv6 if you will)
And then there's John Stossel over at ABC who admitted his corporate overlords routinely censor his pro-small government stories
Maybe because ABC doesn't give a crap about Stossel's pro-small government agenda/propaganda? What's so amazing about a news network not giving carte blanche to a journalist to push any of the shit he wants? Oh let me guess, you're pro-small government?
Unrelatedly, your sig. Whose arse did you pull that figure from?!?
Agreed with the other poster, you're wrong, they've been actively pursuing the goal of fulfilling the prophecy. They make it a primary goal to increase the number of transistors by all means. If it wasn't for the law they wouldn't have done things like they have. The law itself won't fulfil itself that simply, you need to throw billions at it to keep up.
Intel said 4 nm for 2022, that's in 13 years. What precisely allows you to doubt that claims, except maybe the fact that deadlines are often missed? Let me rephrase that, what allows you to think that it'll be reached much later than anything else?
Also, queue a dozen+ posts explaining to the armchair pundits how 560x is possible.
I know what you mean, I myself am French and am shocked and appalled by the poor grammar of people in Ireland. But I think the point isn't necessarily that their English itself is better (sadly), it's that they're better at writing. They're better at telling a story or arguing. Even if they can't tell 'than' from 'then'.
You make a great point, I shudder at the thought of what people 50 years ago would have written, but there's also another aspect to this, it's that people less familiar with the Internet write in more inadequate ways. They sometimes force a relaxation to their writing style thinking that it's appropriate for anyone on the Internet to have a loose use of grammar and abbreviate everything. The most shocking example of this was when a retired journalist who is fairly famous in my country and even wrote books all on his own sent me e-mails. The writing was very inadequate and awkward, essentially it sounded like a 65 year old trying to sound like a 16 year old.
My point being, your relatives who are much less familiar with writing on the Internet don't necessarily know how to express themselves correctly on that particular medium, thinking it's somehow different from writing a letter. Not that they might not be less literate on top of that.
Yup, you've watched too many dystopian movies, so has mostly anyone on Slashdot who can't help but think we're bound to head for a dystopian future. Yes, fiction does influence people's perception of reality, even more so when it comes to the perception of the future.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be incremental progress.
No, that's bullshit. That's willingly overlooking the original invention of the Internet and of personal computers. That's also overlooking the revolutionary consequences of the popularisation and eventual ubiquity of these. Over the last 15 years, personal computers and the Internet have profoundly changed the way we live and the way we do many things.
I for one am a great example of that. I don't have a TV, I don't make or receive telephone calls, I don't go to the movies, I don't own a video game console, I don't buy music, I don't read newspapers and I don't buy pornos because the Internet superseded all of that. Not only that, but I owe my practically flawless English (I'm French) to chatting with Americans on AIM ever since I was 15, I also learnt my job mostly on the Internet (I'm a mostly self-taught DSP dev), and to top it all off I'm a self-employed software dev who makes all of his income from software sales from all around the world. That didn't affect just "us", my uncle after being divorced fell in love with a woman in South America (not Mark Sanford) he "met" on MSN, and now he lives with her there. The Internet made him move to Colombia and marry a woman he never met before, out of the blue.
If you still fail to see how personal computers/the Internet have revolutionised things you're just blind. I'm not arguing that things are going faster or slower, I personally don't think that it means anything to talk about progress rate, and I even less believe that there is any sort of general trend, just sectors that get "bursts of progress" before stabilising. I find it silly to try to bring "progress of anything" into a unidimensional variable (but if anyone disagrees please give me a reading of your progress-speedometer. Oh also, what progress wasn't "incremental"? There were steam automobiles in the late 18th century that could reach a few miles per hour. Airplanes are just gliders with a propeller, and manned gliders have flown since 875 A.D.. Telephones are just fancy eletrical telegraphs, television has evolved from so many different things (photography, radio, Nipkow disks, pantelegraphs...), and the Internet itself is just a fancy evolution of transoceanic electrical telegraphy (if you think about it, the worldwide telegraph network of the later part of the 19th century is very Internet-like). I don't see what can possibly be "non-incremental", nothing suddenly just "popped up" to cause a revolution. Many of those were centuries in the making.
It's not because what you expected didn't happen that things are going slower. People always make wild predictions, they fail to happen, and something that they had never thought about happens instead. Sorry, no flying car for you, here, have a multiplayer game of GTA IV with some a bunch of foreigners, or download and watch a movie with your pocket telephone.
Fast forward 30 years later: "Oh noes, we're nowhere near getting our Skynet/Singularity. You suck, ghost of Kurzweil! (Oh yeah, in the future we're totally getting devices to communicate with spirits, space aliens and other ethereal beings. You heard it here first!)"
A bit off-topic, but has science fiction dealt with such things as augmented reality in the eye? It just occurred to me that it could be interesting to explore the possibilities of people living in an augmented world where the most important stuff cannot be seen (like other people who might not be present and just "augmented", like holograms).
Although that would probably turn into just another dystopia future thingie, cause when you think about it, what are you going to do with a new tech as the basis of a story besides making shit go wrong?
No, you don't see it, it doesn't get in the way of your vision.
What, that's the best you got? The first one is called politics, that's how things actually work. Inspiring ideals-filled speeches are great for getting the public opinion behind you, but when it comes to getting the job done, you have to get your hands dirty and compromise left and right to even get a faint shadow of what you promised to happen. If you compromise with a powerful lobby behind closed doors then you won't have to compromise in the bills you want to pass to keep them happy.
As for the RIAA lawyers, allow me to dismiss it as general lawyer-bashing. Lawyers do what they have to to win for whoever pays them. They were picked because they were good lawyers. It doesn't matter what they did before (as long as it was legal), lawyers are the military of the justice system, they'll shower your ass with legal napalm and white phosphorous to accomplish their mission.
Obvious troll is obvious. I mean seriously, get subtle.
Interesting, my main change in P2P habits is due to the fact that most of the stuff I want is on rapidshare or megaupload, so instead of searching on thepiratebay or eMule (which I hardly use anymore because of that), I search on filestube. I used to download torrents of entire seasons of TV shows, but now all I gotta do is find the episode I want on megaupload, and as soon as it starts downloading I start watching it by opening the .part file with VLC.
But as for the real cause of the difference between day and night, QoS? Seems obvious.. Nothing necessarily malicious coming from the ISPs, for one thing they're right to have QoS for more time-dependant traffic, and then if you yourself watch YouTube or download some files over HTTP then your P2P traffic is gonna take a hit.
Doesn't Windows do the same thing? I clearly recall being prevented from install Windows Me (I think) on a P133 because it didn't have 233 MHz or whatever. Same thing for XP iirc.
Also I don't know what's the reason, but I heard of some problems installing Leopard on 866 MHz machines. Might have to do with hardware support, i.e. they didn't want to keep on supporting the old hardware. It's just Apple's policy to be light on legacy support, I admit it's a bit annoying but it works for them.
I thought everyone knew that the gulf war syndrome was due to artillery shells encased in depleted uranium, or something like that (saw many documentaries on this a few years ago).
Ah, youth in asia. Got it. Took me a minute.
Obvious troll is obvious (or a dumbass, I'm not sure). Obviously they mean the OpenGL-based engine, not the whole damn thing down to the smallest chip.
Are you kidding? X-Plane can't even handle supersonic flight simulation properly. The flight model is seriously broken when it comes to supersonic flight, and it has no decent combat systems. It's a neat simulator for subsonic aircraft design, it's a good thing to use if you're a civil pilot, but it must fall short on so many things when it comes to what's needed here it's not even funny.
TL;DR : Way to talk out of your arse.
It's called a UCAV and it's being developed. It's being developed, it's not there yet.
The problem would have solved itself a long time ago if the right way to say 2^30 sounded cooler than "gibi". No one's going to adopt that because it sounds lame, which is why the problem persists despite everyone knowing the solution (because no one likes the solution. A bit like IPv6 if you will)
And then there's John Stossel over at ABC who admitted his corporate overlords routinely censor his pro-small government stories
Maybe because ABC doesn't give a crap about Stossel's pro-small government agenda/propaganda? What's so amazing about a news network not giving carte blanche to a journalist to push any of the shit he wants? Oh let me guess, you're pro-small government?
Unrelatedly, your sig. Whose arse did you pull that figure from?!?
This. Must I deduce that 'transhumanism' is like furry fandom except with robots instead of felines?
I wish I would have heard this advice before I named my FOSS project ARSE.
Nice repost (it's a comment FTFA)
Agreed with the other poster, you're wrong, they've been actively pursuing the goal of fulfilling the prophecy. They make it a primary goal to increase the number of transistors by all means. If it wasn't for the law they wouldn't have done things like they have. The law itself won't fulfil itself that simply, you need to throw billions at it to keep up.
Undoubtedly, however this is too early to call, for all we know they might just make it.
Intel said 4 nm for 2022, that's in 13 years. What precisely allows you to doubt that claims, except maybe the fact that deadlines are often missed? Let me rephrase that, what allows you to think that it'll be reached much later than anything else?
Also, queue a dozen+ posts explaining to the armchair pundits how 560x is possible.
I know what you mean, I myself am French and am shocked and appalled by the poor grammar of people in Ireland. But I think the point isn't necessarily that their English itself is better (sadly), it's that they're better at writing. They're better at telling a story or arguing. Even if they can't tell 'than' from 'then'.
You make a great point, I shudder at the thought of what people 50 years ago would have written, but there's also another aspect to this, it's that people less familiar with the Internet write in more inadequate ways. They sometimes force a relaxation to their writing style thinking that it's appropriate for anyone on the Internet to have a loose use of grammar and abbreviate everything. The most shocking example of this was when a retired journalist who is fairly famous in my country and even wrote books all on his own sent me e-mails. The writing was very inadequate and awkward, essentially it sounded like a 65 year old trying to sound like a 16 year old.
My point being, your relatives who are much less familiar with writing on the Internet don't necessarily know how to express themselves correctly on that particular medium, thinking it's somehow different from writing a letter. Not that they might not be less literate on top of that.
Are they going to hang a 'Mission Accomplished' banner?
Yup, you've watched too many dystopian movies, so has mostly anyone on Slashdot who can't help but think we're bound to head for a dystopian future. Yes, fiction does influence people's perception of reality, even more so when it comes to the perception of the future.