Please, he didn't even say if having a black President was a good or bad thing.
It's also hard to say that having a black President doesn't change things considering, oh I dunno, maybe that we have never had a black President before?
Being pro-integration is not being racist.
This nation wasn't founded on partisanship at all. Everyone knows that out founding fathers didn't initially plan a partisan system, but partisanship is a result of how our government and our psychology works.
I think it would be much better to have a non-partisan system, where there aren't only two opinions to choose from. Wouldn't it make much more sense if one could select from, say, 10 candidates with different ideas on things, rather than choosing either Democrat or Republican?
If we have a more limited number of options, the race becomes much more about choosing "the lesser of two evils" than choosing the best person possible to become the president.
That isn't quite true. I'm assuming you are thinking of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems and not some other very recent development, there is nothing that says a computer cannot do math/make proofs. Only that with a finite set of axioms, a computer (or a person) cannot prove an infinite number of things.
There really is no reason that a strong AI couldn't prove something a human could, and computer assisted proofs are already quite common, although that is different than a computer proving something on it's own.
For anyone thinking about clicking that link, it seems to be a legitimate rar containing source code and an executable for an exploit, looks to be this one.
Now that your curiosity it settled, you probably shouldn't click that unless you trust the owner/controller of milw0rm.com to not infect whichever system you have.
</warning >
You're right, looking at the page of results http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302500,00.asp there is only a small gap in performance, and in some cases, Vista beats XP by as much as 2 frames per second on low quality. But overall, that still shows XP to have better performance, so why should someone buy the more recent, very slightly inferior product when they can get the better one, and probably have an install disk for the better one lying around?
You're right that wikipedia doesn't really 'understand' the subjects it has, but it does have interconnected links in a computer readable form that link different topics together in logical ways.
While it is generated by users rather than being automatic, it's still a step in the right direction.
It isn't necessary to have a computer understand the context of something more than what is useful. If a computer can do what we want, who cares if it really 'knows' what it's doing?
I don't mean to say slow exactly, but the progression of lithography technology doesn't seem to be moving as fast as other areas are. This could just be because I don't really understand the whole process of photolithograpy-- I understand that it is complicated, but the sizes are decreasing by a constant factor of about 1.4 every 2-3ish years, while we can easily see hard drive density increasing exponentially.
That is why (well maybe a possible reason why) companies have just been making multi-core machines. The lithography technology isn't increasing by huge leaps like it used to, so to counter that, you can just stick more dies in a package.
This technology, on the other hand, says it can create chips 100 times more dense, that just seems like a major leap from the current track record.
Of course it's a complicated process, and both companies are making incredible progress in what a chip can achieve, but the computing power per core hasn't changed that much in the past couple years.
Do current chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD work on new lithography techniques, or do they focus more on architectural changes?
It seems that they shrink their process at a fairly slow rate, and both companies seem to do it at about the same speed.
Also, if they both have been just advancing the standard techniques using high frequency light to etch all the chips, how easily could they change their manufacturing process over to something radically different?
Seeing chips with 100 times more density would offer incredible benefits for speed and power savings, seeing the recent changes that the 65nm to 45nm process has brought. Hopefully we'll actually be able to see this process being used inside the next 10 years though.
But the problem is stuff like that just isn't going to happen in Windows or OSX.
It's not difficult to upgrade your Ubuntu system and then end up with a new version of your graphics driver that doesn't work, or that decided to reconfigure xorg.conf to something that isn't what you want.
Now on the one hand, Windows and OSX users just don't get presented with the opportunity to update their graphics cards, at least not as regularly as linux users do with a nice package management system. I'm just saying this is a double-edged sword, you get the better graphics drivers, but it's entirely possible to screw something up, and most users don't care if their graphics system is up to date or not, they just click anything that says upgrade.
So while it can happen on any OS, and I'm sure it does happen to people using OSs other than linux, I'm just saying that linux makes it much easier to screw up the graphics drivers, because it currently is geared towards people that can fix that problem if they have it.
Now obviously most of us here with at least a bit of linux experience know that you can just go edit the xorg.conf file or switch back to the old drivers and have xorg configured from the command line automatically, but the problem is that most users of computers can't.
The average user will think their computer is broken if they suddenly don't have a GUI interface, and there is no way in hell you'll be able to get them to fix it 'manually'.
I love linux and don't plan on switching my OS anytime soon because I don't mind dealing with these issues. But we need to understand people won't switch to linux when clicking an option on a dialog box will bork their graphics interface. Linux still has a ways to go before it can overrun the desktop market, but it's getting closer, and hopefully the newest Ubuntu release will get some more converts.
I'm more curious about how normal windows applications work. Will every day things like firefox or internet explorer, or things like pidgin or the proprietary AIM client work?
Those aren't the best examples, but does anyone know if it runs all windows sfotware natively?
I imagine a lot of schools that have never used supercomputers before might just expect it to 'just work' like their beloved windows does, in that you just load up any old program and suddenly it works faster.
Now obviously not all programs will see a gain, but does windows see it as just a multicore computer running Vista?
(sorry if these questions were answered in the article, but I didn't read it of course)
Sure, it's possible to go to college and do work without the internet at all! But the fact is there are legitimate uses for having lots of bandwidth.
What if someone wants to buy a video off of iTunes?
Are you saying they shouldn't be able to because they are in college?
What if someone just built a new computer and wants to get the most recent Ubuntu DVD iso?
Are you saying they should wait 3 days to do it?
What if one of their professors has PDFs online for their problem sets or as papers for them to read?
They can easily reach 10MB, and while it isn't horrible waiting 10 minutes so you can do your school work, why bother?
Yes, students can sit around and wait, or download things while they're asleep, but what the hell is the point in that?
The university has the bandwidth, why should they inconvenience students paying $40k a year just so that... what? It's more annoying to download files, so maybe they will download less illegal files?
Sorry buddy, that's just bullshit.
I think the school should allow students to get their own bandwidth using FiOS or something. The overall cost could be less for kids that don't need it, and a bit more for those that want to torrent, and the University doesn't have to bother paying to police it. (I know this has it's own problems, but I'm just saying.)
What are they supposed to make a backup of?
The license to the song? That won't prove anything, and it won't get their site back.
Should they send a copy of the song? That doesn't prove that they released it for free.
Backups are good, but I don't think that's the problem in this case. It's just a very unreasonable ISP.
Well if the goal is to eliminate carbon emissions, then we don't get usable fuel as a bonus. Once that fuel is spent, the air has the same amount of carbon dioxide in it, so basically it's just another energy storage medium. So the question really boils down to, is it more efficient than something like batteries?
Chances are, it isn't. And then as you said, we could just store it somewhere, but then how is this different from http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/30/2211209
I suppose it could also be useful because it's sort of like a renewable energy source, as long as it's powered from something like nuclear or solar, and it doesn't require us to change our cars engines, but there are also other ways of making hydrocarbons ( http://www.recoveredenergy.com/d_plasma.html )
This really doesn't seem like anything that useful. If CO2 could be converted into electrical energy on the other hand... then they might have something worth investing in. As it is now, it's just using energy in inefficient processes (converting the CO2 to hydrocarbons, and then converting the hydrocarbons to energy) with no benefits emission wise.
How would you decide if they were reputable?
You could check the number of published articles they have... Oh wait.
Working past that small problem though, it could be an interesting idea, although for some reason if you don't have to pay outrageous sums of money, like you do for scientific journals, peers will probably have better things to do than fact-check the wiki, so it will probably turn out being just like arvix.
A computer is more than a chip and memory.
Can you explain how all parts of a computer work at an electrical level? Molecular level? Atomic? Subatomic?
I'm not trying to say you should know how all that works (although as nerds we try to understand as much as we can) but neither should a computer.
Being able to explain how something works doesn't make that something any less alive.
Scientists have been able to simulate a mouse brain (albeit for a very short period of time), does that mean that mice aren't alive?
It wouldn't be perpetual motion, it would take energy from earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes, etc. that cause massive amounts of water to be displaced.
It wouldn't be perpetual energy, but it would be free energy, very similar to tidal power
Unless I'm missing something obvious, this wouldn't be perpetual motion...
Slashdot Mirror
Please, he didn't even say if having a black President was a good or bad thing.
It's also hard to say that having a black President doesn't change things considering, oh I dunno, maybe that we have never had a black President before?
Being pro-integration is not being racist.
This nation wasn't founded on partisanship at all. Everyone knows that out founding fathers didn't initially plan a partisan system, but partisanship is a result of how our government and our psychology works.
I think it would be much better to have a non-partisan system, where there aren't only two opinions to choose from. Wouldn't it make much more sense if one could select from, say, 10 candidates with different ideas on things, rather than choosing either Democrat or Republican?
If we have a more limited number of options, the race becomes much more about choosing "the lesser of two evils" than choosing the best person possible to become the president.
That isn't quite true. I'm assuming you are thinking of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems and not some other very recent development, there is nothing that says a computer cannot do math/make proofs. Only that with a finite set of axioms, a computer (or a person) cannot prove an infinite number of things.
There really is no reason that a strong AI couldn't prove something a human could, and computer assisted proofs are already quite common, although that is different than a computer proving something on it's own.
You must be new here. You aren't supposed to read the file, just make comments about what it might say.
No don't you get it? If you get banned in the forums you get banned in real li^H^H^H^H the online game!
For anyone thinking about clicking that link, it seems to be a legitimate rar containing source code and an executable for an exploit, looks to be this one.
Now that your curiosity it settled, you probably shouldn't click that unless you trust the owner/controller of milw0rm.com to not infect whichever system you have. </warning >
You're right, looking at the page of results http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302500,00.asp there is only a small gap in performance, and in some cases, Vista beats XP by as much as 2 frames per second on low quality. But overall, that still shows XP to have better performance, so why should someone buy the more recent, very slightly inferior product when they can get the better one, and probably have an install disk for the better one lying around?
You're right that wikipedia doesn't really 'understand' the subjects it has, but it does have interconnected links in a computer readable form that link different topics together in logical ways.
While it is generated by users rather than being automatic, it's still a step in the right direction.
It isn't necessary to have a computer understand the context of something more than what is useful. If a computer can do what we want, who cares if it really 'knows' what it's doing?
I don't mean to say slow exactly, but the progression of lithography technology doesn't seem to be moving as fast as other areas are. This could just be because I don't really understand the whole process of photolithograpy-- I understand that it is complicated, but the sizes are decreasing by a constant factor of about 1.4 every 2-3ish years, while we can easily see hard drive density increasing exponentially.
That is why (well maybe a possible reason why) companies have just been making multi-core machines. The lithography technology isn't increasing by huge leaps like it used to, so to counter that, you can just stick more dies in a package.
This technology, on the other hand, says it can create chips 100 times more dense, that just seems like a major leap from the current track record.
Of course it's a complicated process, and both companies are making incredible progress in what a chip can achieve, but the computing power per core hasn't changed that much in the past couple years.
Do current chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD work on new lithography techniques, or do they focus more on architectural changes?
It seems that they shrink their process at a fairly slow rate, and both companies seem to do it at about the same speed.
Also, if they both have been just advancing the standard techniques using high frequency light to etch all the chips, how easily could they change their manufacturing process over to something radically different?
Seeing chips with 100 times more density would offer incredible benefits for speed and power savings, seeing the recent changes that the 65nm to 45nm process has brought. Hopefully we'll actually be able to see this process being used inside the next 10 years though.
But the problem is stuff like that just isn't going to happen in Windows or OSX.
It's not difficult to upgrade your Ubuntu system and then end up with a new version of your graphics driver that doesn't work, or that decided to reconfigure xorg.conf to something that isn't what you want.
Now on the one hand, Windows and OSX users just don't get presented with the opportunity to update their graphics cards, at least not as regularly as linux users do with a nice package management system. I'm just saying this is a double-edged sword, you get the better graphics drivers, but it's entirely possible to screw something up, and most users don't care if their graphics system is up to date or not, they just click anything that says upgrade.
So while it can happen on any OS, and I'm sure it does happen to people using OSs other than linux, I'm just saying that linux makes it much easier to screw up the graphics drivers, because it currently is geared towards people that can fix that problem if they have it.
Now obviously most of us here with at least a bit of linux experience know that you can just go edit the xorg.conf file or switch back to the old drivers and have xorg configured from the command line automatically, but the problem is that most users of computers can't.
The average user will think their computer is broken if they suddenly don't have a GUI interface, and there is no way in hell you'll be able to get them to fix it 'manually'.
I love linux and don't plan on switching my OS anytime soon because I don't mind dealing with these issues. But we need to understand people won't switch to linux when clicking an option on a dialog box will bork their graphics interface. Linux still has a ways to go before it can overrun the desktop market, but it's getting closer, and hopefully the newest Ubuntu release will get some more converts.
You got paid to make that comment?
What? You didn't?
You better look into that if you aren't getting your paycheck.
You actually only wrote "tiny " unless I am missing something...
/me kills the joke even more
I'm more curious about how normal windows applications work. Will every day things like firefox or internet explorer, or things like pidgin or the proprietary AIM client work?
Those aren't the best examples, but does anyone know if it runs all windows sfotware natively?
I imagine a lot of schools that have never used supercomputers before might just expect it to 'just work' like their beloved windows does, in that you just load up any old program and suddenly it works faster.
Now obviously not all programs will see a gain, but does windows see it as just a multicore computer running Vista?
(sorry if these questions were answered in the article, but I didn't read it of course)
I think I just threw up a little.
1. Purchase Puzzlotto
2. Solve the puzzle while no one else does
3. Claim your prize money on the last day
4. Profit!!
Well, it seems pretty clear to me
Sure, it's possible to go to college and do work without the internet at all! But the fact is there are legitimate uses for having lots of bandwidth.
What if someone wants to buy a video off of iTunes?
Are you saying they shouldn't be able to because they are in college?
What if someone just built a new computer and wants to get the most recent Ubuntu DVD iso?
Are you saying they should wait 3 days to do it?
What if one of their professors has PDFs online for their problem sets or as papers for them to read?
They can easily reach 10MB, and while it isn't horrible waiting 10 minutes so you can do your school work, why bother?
Yes, students can sit around and wait, or download things while they're asleep, but what the hell is the point in that?
The university has the bandwidth, why should they inconvenience students paying $40k a year just so that... what? It's more annoying to download files, so maybe they will download less illegal files?
Sorry buddy, that's just bullshit.
I think the school should allow students to get their own bandwidth using FiOS or something. The overall cost could be less for kids that don't need it, and a bit more for those that want to torrent, and the University doesn't have to bother paying to police it. (I know this has it's own problems, but I'm just saying.)
What are they supposed to make a backup of?
The license to the song? That won't prove anything, and it won't get their site back.
Should they send a copy of the song? That doesn't prove that they released it for free.
Backups are good, but I don't think that's the problem in this case. It's just a very unreasonable ISP.
Well if the goal is to eliminate carbon emissions, then we don't get usable fuel as a bonus. Once that fuel is spent, the air has the same amount of carbon dioxide in it, so basically it's just another energy storage medium. So the question really boils down to, is it more efficient than something like batteries?
Chances are, it isn't. And then as you said, we could just store it somewhere, but then how is this different from http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/30/2211209
I suppose it could also be useful because it's sort of like a renewable energy source, as long as it's powered from something like nuclear or solar, and it doesn't require us to change our cars engines, but there are also other ways of making hydrocarbons ( http://www.recoveredenergy.com/d_plasma.html )
This really doesn't seem like anything that useful. If CO2 could be converted into electrical energy on the other hand... then they might have something worth investing in. As it is now, it's just using energy in inefficient processes (converting the CO2 to hydrocarbons, and then converting the hydrocarbons to energy) with no benefits emission wise.
No no no this is the proprietary process:
1. Get CO2
2. Put CO2 in machine.
3. ????? (tm)
4. Sell oil.
5. Profit.
How would you decide if they were reputable?
You could check the number of published articles they have...
Oh wait.
Working past that small problem though, it could be an interesting idea, although for some reason if you don't have to pay outrageous sums of money, like you do for scientific journals, peers will probably have better things to do than fact-check the wiki, so it will probably turn out being just like arvix.
A computer is more than a chip and memory.
Can you explain how all parts of a computer work at an electrical level? Molecular level? Atomic? Subatomic?
I'm not trying to say you should know how all that works (although as nerds we try to understand as much as we can) but neither should a computer.
Being able to explain how something works doesn't make that something any less alive.
Scientists have been able to simulate a mouse brain (albeit for a very short period of time), does that mean that mice aren't alive?
Not anymore
It wouldn't be perpetual motion, it would take energy from earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes, etc. that cause massive amounts of water to be displaced.
It wouldn't be perpetual energy, but it would be free energy, very similar to tidal power Unless I'm missing something obvious, this wouldn't be perpetual motion...