A new kind of Girlfriend
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Imagine if you are sitting there playing Halo. After stopping to go grab a coke, your girlfriend walks into the room asking you if you'd like her to roll into adaptive mode. You say yes and she begins to learn, as you play, what your needs are.
You go to resume your game again after the coke and almost immediately, you find that the your girlfriend seems more quiet and responsive to your needs. Out in the kitchen, she is out there preparing a virtual smorgasboard of all the food and drink you need the most. No longer are you being forced to locate old cheese snacks from some resealable container. No, instead your girlfriend has done the work for you with no interaction on your part whatsoever. Sounds interesting? Just wait, it gets weirder
During the course of your gaming, your girlfriend has already learned from previous experiences that you do not like to be bothered with request for attention when working on specific missions. It's not so much the game being used mind you, rather the type of "work" being done at the time.
An important sms from your brother with his score comes in along with a number of less important family messages. Thanks to Brandy X's new attitide, the only sms you are alerted to is the one your girlfriend knows will be critical. Even though the other less important sms are coming from the same person, your girlfriend understands how to respond for you, just the way you prefer.
....
TREK-1 has an important role in neuroprotection against epilepsy and brain and spinal chord ischemia. So there are some very adverse side effects to this.
The article seems very light. There's lots of interesting stuff to be found if you google for "trek-1 gene".
Why do highly instinctive creatures need memory to survive? Maybe a goldfish just has good firmware that only needs a small amount of memory to work with. Ants probably don't have much memory, but their programming enables them to function effectively, as well as enabling the group to act as a whole.
Yeah the reply is acting like an AOLuser by adding a comment "ME TOO!!!". AOLusers are known for using excessive capitalisation and punctuation, as well as stupid replies like "Me too".
Depends what country you live in. In Australia I use comsec that charges $30 a trade. You need to do a bit of training first as only 20% of people doing day trading actually make a profit as you are competing against all the other people doing day trading.
For your training, take that $1000 and set fire to it. Then after you save up another $1000 and set fire to that. Keep on doing this until you can burn the money without getting emotionally wound up about losing the money. Once you get to that point you can then trade objectively and not make stupid rash decisions which will lose you even more money.
I bet there's some of you out there who think I'm joking.
The group I work with do lots of mathematics as part of programming duties, however we don't hire CS/Maths grads. When it comes to modelling, image processing, and analysis of big hardware/software problems Engineers are a cut above the rest. If you are good at maths my recommendation is get out of CS and get into Engineering if you can. It's a big shift, and it will be hard but when a serious project (eg software/hardware for defence, space, aeronautics, roads, trains) needs people to do the maths they are going to grab engineers.
Motorolla set up shop here in South Australia for a while to develop wireless comms. The government increased the student numbers in a CS course at the university in anticipation of Moto taking them. How many of those students did Moto take? None. They took in engineers instead.
John Carmack (from memory of reading his.plan file) used Laplace Transforms in the Quake 3 engine for some of his physics calculations. Want to know what a Laplace Transform is? ask en engineer. He/She will tell you it's a way of modelling a system that is timeslice independent so no matter what frame rate you run at you will always get the same answer. Now try and do that with the CS grads first choice of timesliced Newtonian Physics calculations - you can't..well you can if you interate of your physics calcs multiple times for each frame but it still wont give the right result, just a consistent one.
You should attach a warning to this that some areas in Defence are like sheltered workshops for people who can't hack it in industry. Projects often start as vehicles for managers to build themselves little empires and when the prospect of promotion comes up they want to shelve the project as fast as they can so that they can move on.
Schedules, Costs, Project Management all goes out the window and often the line is "We are a research lab, producing stuff is for industry". The result is that you get complacent and start to lose your drive. If you want to be thrown into the deep end look for work in some of the big international contracting companies.
Now instead of having a large range of MP3s to choose from I can choose from a limited range of music that is encumbered with DRM. Where do I send my money?...allofmp3.com I guess. I wonder if the music industry will eventually get it?
So, here's the president of one of the main suppliers for the PS3 talking about how Microsoft didn't choose him, but even if they did, his company couldn't afford to actually build the GPU for the 360? Excuse me if I don't take his comments with a bucket full of salt.
nVidia did the GPU for the Xbox and it turned out very costly for them on 2 fronts:
- It took many engineers out of their mainstream development. The chip they came out with after that was the Geforce 5000 series. This chip wasn't properly engineered and ended up a flop because it wasn't fast enough, and it was way too hot. nVidia came back later with the 6000 series, but the 5000 series was disheartening for nVidia fanbois, and it would have cost nVidia a lot as they would not have gotten much return for the amount spent putting that chip out. Setting up chip production lines is very very expensive.
- Microsofts approach to the original xbox was like building a customised PC. There were many parts and MS were feeling price pressure. They passed this pressure onto nVidia and tried to get nVidia to share in the losses. How far MS succeeded in this I don't know, but nVidia it's possible that nVidia were making a loss on every xbox chio made.
Afterall the lyrics are copyrighted, the same as music, movies, and books, but it has been a nice way to track down "that song" that you heard on the radio by just typing a few of the lyrics you heard into Google. Well I guess that's dead. The music companies have shown they are willing to do anything to get every last cent they can using their old ways. Watching a subtitled music video has a lot of copyrights attached to it: The lyrics, the musical note order, the performance by the artist, the video, and potentially the font used to show the lyrics in the subtitles. From all the effort that has gone into producing those parts they need their due payment, afterall with rising fuel prices its getting very expensive to run enormous yaghts and exotic car collections.
Eventually the media companies are going to push too hard. Many big companies like to ride the line, and it seems legally that with the current political influence they have the media companies can keep on moving that line so they don't cross it. The question is, where has the consumer market set that line? People might express some negative feelings about record companines extorting money from single mothers living in poverty, but they still keep on buying, so I guess that line hasn't been reached yet either. There's too many other things to worry about these days...like not being able to post a comment on slashdot for 6+ hours because Database maintenance is taking place. Noooo!
Yes, it should be just sufficient enough to boot the operating system and allow you to play Solitaire at a playable frame rate. They should have Core Trio out by then anyway so I wouldn't worry.
I've been holding my breath waiting for AMD to respond. Anytime now would be a good time for them to announce how they are going to counter the Core Duo. But the reality might be that they need to recoup their costs from developing the AM2 platform before they can make any changes.
I think the competition has been good, but if Intel returns wearing the performance crown then I think there is a real potential that the CPU market will be dominated by Intel more so than it has ever been before, with consoles being the main holdout. If these benchmarks are true, then the introduction of the Core Duo will be a real turning point I think. Keep in mind that these speeds are introductory and that in the past Intel hasn't had much trouble progressing to higher performance out of the same architecture.
The converter is open source. The native file format of Word 2007 is probably closely linked to the way data comes out of word, so it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to figure that the converter could be ported to OpenOffice to allow the loading of Word 2007 files.
Note that Microsoft is also patching old office versons to output the new file format, so this should improve your situation. Time will tell I guess. It's always hard trying to walk in the opposite direction to the majority of the crowd, but it's a choice we have.
Imagine though the possibility for when it does replace RAM. People here are talking about hard drive replacements and RAM replacements, but what if it replaces both? We have 64 bit operating systems and CPUs, why not just have all applications loaded and the data loaded in them, and the OS just marks which applications are currently active. Of course there would have to be a major change in the way applications and operating systems currently work. Data formats would become memory based layouts for editing. That texture you are editing in Photoshop would be shared with your 3D modelling software in memory so it should change on the screen as you edit it.
Here in Australia I've seen them throw to an add just before the punch-line, and you come back already a little bit into the next scene. This seemed to happen a lot back in the day with Seinfeld.
But I've seen movies cut up a bit too. You get some really bad cuts on some of those 3am movies where they just seem to chuck in an ad anywhere and when you come back it's like they didn't stop the movie running or something.
Cause I can't stand it when free tv cuts something so that they can fit in more advertisements. And in the case of free tv the consumer doesn't want the amount of entertainment to be trimmed down in favor of advertising material.
No this won't work for the ask slashdotter, as they will need to reduce the picture to the colors of the pencils/textas / crayons the child has. Same with any other image processing software that follows the steps you have outlined. It's close though, just need to refine the first step.
I guess the person could write their own software, hell I'm tempted to write it myself as I have an hour free. You need to have a list of colors available to the child, and then reduce all the colors in the picture by closest match down to those selected colors. Then you follow the other steps you have listed which simulates doing a boundary trace around each color region, then you need to get the computer to put a number inside each region, you add a legend for the numbers and you are there.
Man I can't believe you came back with that old Posix chestnut. Its something that I see Linux fanatics trot out all the time and what they seem to not understand is that to the majority of Windows users it *just isn't important*, so why should Microsoft worry about something their customers don't want. Singularity is nothing like unix. It specifically exculdes the ability to modify a running process after it is loaded, so there is no runtime loading of libraries. If you follow that link in the parent post of your post, you will see there are a couple of videos at the bottom that can give you an idea about what they are doing. Windows has also had interprocess communication since 3.0 days. Yes the Windows way is different but people being different allows us to compare and improve. Imagine if Apple or DEC had decided to do everything the Unix way then we wouldn't have experienced the diversity that was Macintosh and VMS.
Unix/Linux has a long heritage, and years and years of improvement have made it a very good OS. Linux feels feels sharp, responsive and reliable, and I wish Windows had the same feel as it's what pays the most to develop for, hence that's what I'm using during my working hours, but why should a company be criticised for trying to do something different?
Micorsoft singularity http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/ has been going on for a while. Has some interesting things about it that make it more multicore friendly, although completely infriendly in the current environment. For example it doesn't allow DLLs, but rather your libraries load up as seperate processes, and use pipes to communicate with each other.
It also has the goal of being a fully managed operating system, so it should be possible to host it on a variety of devices.
When it comes to a point where they have to abandon the windows code-base or sink under the weight of it, I wonder if they will turn to Singularity?
Sure Nuclear Missiles seem like a good deterent, but are they really? I mean what if someone let off a nuke in the US, how would they know who to fire the missile at? How can they make sure the missile delivers the warhead and isn't taken out in flight.
Obviously what is really needed is a Doomsday weapon that destroys everything automatically if the US is attacked. That way the whole planet will work towards keeping the US safe. Of course it's always best with such a weapon that it is *not* kept a secret.
Re:Whats specific about Taiwan?
on
Spam from Taiwan
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· Score: 1
Hi there er CrazyGuy,
I'm moving to Taiwan in February 2007, and I was wondering if there would be a place in the company you work for. I have 5 years C++ experience, 4 years C#, and 6 months WPF/Avalon. My qualification is Bachelor of Electronic Engineering. I'm serious. Where should I apply?
Taiwan has a different government to China. Somewhere around 1945, Taiwan was taken from the Japanese, and given back to China which was ruled by Chang Kai Shek (sp?). I think it was around 1949 that the Communist Party (run by Chairman Mao) overthrew the CKS government and drove the Nationalist forces back until they retreated to Taiwan. So ever since then Taiwan has been run by the KMT party (Chinese Nationalists), until a few years ago when they were voted out in favour of the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party).
Now CKS had planned to take back China as he built Taipei (the capital was Tainan) to be a city of big streets that could be used as runways for bombers, but that never happened.
For about the last 20 years China has been making noises about bringing Taiwan into the communist fold. The DPP party in Taiwan has been making noises about declaring Taiwan independent from China, and so China has responded with bigger noises. I would say that nothing will happen until the Olympics are over..
Re:Whats specific about Taiwan?
on
Spam from Taiwan
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Having been to Taiwan a fair bit I can think of some possibilities:-
Most people I know there earn about US$15k/yr, and upgrading the RAM in your Pentium3 machine and then the Hard Drive, and then the video card is sort of common practice. Forking out big $$ for Windows XP isn't real easy so a lot of people are running some SP1 version of Windows XP they bought for $1 off the street, and this version gets owned pretty fast, and can't be patched from windows update. So there are lots of bots.
Now 24Mbit internet access is like $5-$10 per month, so you can see there is quite a big engine there for generating spam.
The culture there is such that they love the latest thing, so I could imagine that there would also be a tendency for people to install software off the net that has malware in it as well.
Another thing I noticed is that your average grandmother there seems quite good at using a computer. So I could imagine that there might be more pensioner types sitting there doing some amount of spamming for a little bit of money.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine if you are sitting there playing Halo. After stopping to go grab a coke, your girlfriend walks into the room asking you if you'd like her to roll into adaptive mode. You say yes and she begins to learn, as you play, what your needs are.
....
You go to resume your game again after the coke and almost immediately, you find that the your girlfriend seems more quiet and responsive to your needs. Out in the kitchen, she is out there preparing a virtual smorgasboard of all the food and drink you need the most. No longer are you being forced to locate old cheese snacks from some resealable container. No, instead your girlfriend has done the work for you with no interaction on your part whatsoever. Sounds interesting? Just wait, it gets weirder
During the course of your gaming, your girlfriend has already learned from previous experiences that you do not like to be bothered with request for attention when working on specific missions. It's not so much the game being used mind you, rather the type of "work" being done at the time.
An important sms from your brother with his score comes in along with a number of less important family messages. Thanks to Brandy X's new attitide, the only sms you are alerted to is the one your girlfriend knows will be critical. Even though the other less important sms are coming from the same person, your girlfriend understands how to respond for you, just the way you prefer.
TREK-1 has an important role in neuroprotection against epilepsy and brain and spinal chord ischemia. So there are some very adverse side effects to this.
The article seems very light. There's lots of interesting stuff to be found if you google for "trek-1 gene".
Why do highly instinctive creatures need memory to survive? Maybe a goldfish just has good firmware that only needs a small amount of memory to work with. Ants probably don't have much memory, but their programming enables them to function effectively, as well as enabling the group to act as a whole.
Yeah the reply is acting like an AOLuser by adding a comment "ME TOO!!!". AOLusers are known for using excessive capitalisation and punctuation, as well as stupid replies like "Me too".
For your training, take that $1000 and set fire to it. Then after you save up another $1000 and set fire to that. Keep on doing this until you can burn the money without getting emotionally wound up about losing the money. Once you get to that point you can then trade objectively and not make stupid rash decisions which will lose you even more money.
I bet there's some of you out there who think I'm joking.
The group I work with do lots of mathematics as part of programming duties, however we don't hire CS/Maths grads. When it comes to modelling, image processing, and analysis of big hardware/software problems Engineers are a cut above the rest. If you are good at maths my recommendation is get out of CS and get into Engineering if you can. It's a big shift, and it will be hard but when a serious project (eg software/hardware for defence, space, aeronautics, roads, trains) needs people to do the maths they are going to grab engineers.
.plan file) used Laplace Transforms in the Quake 3 engine for some of his physics calculations. Want to know what a Laplace Transform is? ask en engineer. He/She will tell you it's a way of modelling a system that is timeslice independent so no matter what frame rate you run at you will always get the same answer. Now try and do that with the CS grads first choice of timesliced Newtonian Physics calculations - you can't..well you can if you interate of your physics calcs multiple times for each frame but it still wont give the right result, just a consistent one.
Motorolla set up shop here in South Australia for a while to develop wireless comms. The government increased the student numbers in a CS course at the university in anticipation of Moto taking them. How many of those students did Moto take? None. They took in engineers instead.
John Carmack (from memory of reading his
Schedules, Costs, Project Management all goes out the window and often the line is "We are a research lab, producing stuff is for industry". The result is that you get complacent and start to lose your drive. If you want to be thrown into the deep end look for work in some of the big international contracting companies.
Now instead of having a large range of MP3s to choose from I can choose from a limited range of music that is encumbered with DRM. Where do I send my money?...allofmp3.com I guess. I wonder if the music industry will eventually get it?
nVidia did the GPU for the Xbox and it turned out very costly for them on 2 fronts:
- It took many engineers out of their mainstream development. The chip they came out with after that was the Geforce 5000 series. This chip wasn't properly engineered and ended up a flop because it wasn't fast enough, and it was way too hot. nVidia came back later with the 6000 series, but the 5000 series was disheartening for nVidia fanbois, and it would have cost nVidia a lot as they would not have gotten much return for the amount spent putting that chip out. Setting up chip production lines is very very expensive.
- Microsofts approach to the original xbox was like building a customised PC. There were many parts and MS were feeling price pressure. They passed this pressure onto nVidia and tried to get nVidia to share in the losses. How far MS succeeded in this I don't know, but nVidia it's possible that nVidia were making a loss on every xbox chio made.
Eventually the media companies are going to push too hard. Many big companies like to ride the line, and it seems legally that with the current political influence they have the media companies can keep on moving that line so they don't cross it. The question is, where has the consumer market set that line? People might express some negative feelings about record companines extorting money from single mothers living in poverty, but they still keep on buying, so I guess that line hasn't been reached yet either. There's too many other things to worry about these days...like not being able to post a comment on slashdot for 6+ hours because Database maintenance is taking place. Noooo!
I wonder if we will ever see a Core Pentio?
I think the competition has been good, but if Intel returns wearing the performance crown then I think there is a real potential that the CPU market will be dominated by Intel more so than it has ever been before, with consoles being the main holdout. If these benchmarks are true, then the introduction of the Core Duo will be a real turning point I think. Keep in mind that these speeds are introductory and that in the past Intel hasn't had much trouble progressing to higher performance out of the same architecture.
Note that Microsoft is also patching old office versons to output the new file format, so this should improve your situation. Time will tell I guess. It's always hard trying to walk in the opposite direction to the majority of the crowd, but it's a choice we have.
Imagine though the possibility for when it does replace RAM. People here are talking about hard drive replacements and RAM replacements, but what if it replaces both? We have 64 bit operating systems and CPUs, why not just have all applications loaded and the data loaded in them, and the OS just marks which applications are currently active. Of course there would have to be a major change in the way applications and operating systems currently work. Data formats would become memory based layouts for editing. That texture you are editing in Photoshop would be shared with your 3D modelling software in memory so it should change on the screen as you edit it.
But I've seen movies cut up a bit too. You get some really bad cuts on some of those 3am movies where they just seem to chuck in an ad anywhere and when you come back it's like they didn't stop the movie running or something.
Cause I can't stand it when free tv cuts something so that they can fit in more advertisements. And in the case of free tv the consumer doesn't want the amount of entertainment to be trimmed down in favor of advertising material.
I guess the person could write their own software, hell I'm tempted to write it myself as I have an hour free. You need to have a list of colors available to the child, and then reduce all the colors in the picture by closest match down to those selected colors. Then you follow the other steps you have listed which simulates doing a boundary trace around each color region, then you need to get the computer to put a number inside each region, you add a legend for the numbers and you are there.
Unix/Linux has a long heritage, and years and years of improvement have made it a very good OS. Linux feels feels sharp, responsive and reliable, and I wish Windows had the same feel as it's what pays the most to develop for, hence that's what I'm using during my working hours, but why should a company be criticised for trying to do something different?
It also has the goal of being a fully managed operating system, so it should be possible to host it on a variety of devices.
When it comes to a point where they have to abandon the windows code-base or sink under the weight of it, I wonder if they will turn to Singularity?
So Dick Cheney must be a gamer then.
Obviously what is really needed is a Doomsday weapon that destroys everything automatically if the US is attacked. That way the whole planet will work towards keeping the US safe. Of course it's always best with such a weapon that it is *not* kept a secret.
I'm moving to Taiwan in February 2007, and I was wondering if there would be a place in the company you work for. I have 5 years C++ experience, 4 years C#, and 6 months WPF/Avalon. My qualification is Bachelor of Electronic Engineering. I'm serious. Where should I apply?
Now CKS had planned to take back China as he built Taipei (the capital was Tainan) to be a city of big streets that could be used as runways for bombers, but that never happened.
For about the last 20 years China has been making noises about bringing Taiwan into the communist fold. The DPP party in Taiwan has been making noises about declaring Taiwan independent from China, and so China has responded with bigger noises. I would say that nothing will happen until the Olympics are over..
Most people I know there earn about US$15k/yr, and upgrading the RAM in your Pentium3 machine and then the Hard Drive, and then the video card is sort of common practice. Forking out big $$ for Windows XP isn't real easy so a lot of people are running some SP1 version of Windows XP they bought for $1 off the street, and this version gets owned pretty fast, and can't be patched from windows update. So there are lots of bots.
Now 24Mbit internet access is like $5-$10 per month, so you can see there is quite a big engine there for generating spam.
The culture there is such that they love the latest thing, so I could imagine that there would also be a tendency for people to install software off the net that has malware in it as well.
Another thing I noticed is that your average grandmother there seems quite good at using a computer. So I could imagine that there might be more pensioner types sitting there doing some amount of spamming for a little bit of money.
I found the other post by the same person on kuro5hin more amusing. From http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2003/9/17/205524/ 956/1#1more amusing.