If you read my responses to the two other replies of my post you will find your questions answered about how qualified I consider myself, what training I have and whether I am absolute about this or I can change my views pending new research.
I did not exactly play the "authority card". At least it was not my intention. You think it is wrong telling people that you have relative training and you aren't just pulling things out of your... hat?
So you don't have to (or do I expect you to) respect my "authoritay". But since you are into "authoritive sources" I guess you should check wikipedia (or elsewhere) for "IPCC".
As for the comment about how much more I have to learn about statistics, data analysis etc. I do hope you have several years of lab experience (in a University or other academic research environment) and that wasn't just a bluff, was it?:)
Ok. I have read various papers that show how human activity has affected the climate, which have lead me to formulate my opinions. However, as I reply to the special person below, I have not conducted research myself and it is not my particular field of expertise, so I might have missed something that could prove these papers inaccurate. Just point me to a solid research paper that you feel is more accurate and I might change my mind.
Of course from time to time there are some idiots^H^H^H^H^H^Hneo-Sophists who will state things like "the core of the moon is made of cheese" and just because nobody will care to take the time to refute them they will claim victory.
As a service to the rest of the readers though, I will have to say that sunspot activity is related to the amount of solar radiation that hits the earth. In fact more sunspots means higher radiation (even if it sounds counter-intuitive since the spots appear dark), thus higher temperature on the planet. Indeed, about 300 years ago the sunspot activity had virtualy stopped and the global temperature average had dropped almost by 1C. It is only unfortunate for the parent that for the last 50 years the sunspot activity has been declining...;)
Utterly unrelated field? Right... If I am not a weather man (hint: Leipzig) I am not more qualified than the average Joe it seems. Even if I have training in Atmospheric Physics and Meteorology (and actually I was pretty good at it) - I guess it is totally unrelated. How about you adding a disclaimer "I am not really in a position to even understand what a 'climatologist' is, but I will toss in my flame, just because I feel insecure when people try to post widely accepted scientific facts." No, I am not specifically a Climate Physicist nor have I carried out research in that field. However, I am certainly qualified to understand climatology papers.
Yes, indeed you could be wrong here and you forgot the "IANAP" disclaimer. In fact, I Am A Physicist and I can tell you that what we don't know is exactly how much and how fast the temperature will rise, how the climate change will vary from place to place and how exactly all this will affect our world. What we do know is that the temperature is rising and that for at least half a century we are the ones mainly responsible for that. We also do know that if we don't do something the consequences will be dire. Again, we don't know exactly how bad it will be, but that is no excuse for not doing anything. If you want to know, the drop in temperature that starts the ice age and the warming after it are very slow processes like most others in nature. Forget about what you saw in "Ice Age", it was quite funny but the Earth will not freeze in a few days (and Scrat can't possibly survive after all that he goes through!). Now, if I want to be more precise, the "unfreezing" part (that you inappropriately compared to the current problem of global warming) is slower than the "freezing", probably by a large margin. This is because temperature lowering at the start of the ice age is accelerated by the formation of snow and ice which increase the surface albedo and thus decrease the absorption rate of solar energy. But let's not get off topic. The Earth is a very stable environment judging from how it has nurtured and preserved life for millions of years. So, for a temperature change so sudden as the one observed in recent years, a significant catastrophic event has to occur. Such an event could be a large meteor hitting the surface or a Supervolcano erruption. In our case, the catastrophy was the 20th century man.
I don't understand... He does say he believes in the end the earth will burn up, right? So it has to start warming up for that to happen, right? So what is his problem?
He is just jumping ahead and spoiling "An Inconvenient Truth 2", which will deal with what will happen in the end if we don't stop global warming. Wait for the release dude, and you will see the part about the Earth burning up!
You are missing the point. He isn't being lazy and doesn't complain about parallel threading. Granted, the 360 is less parallel at 3-cores, but his complain is about the asymmetric aspect of the PS3's CPU design. In the end the PS3 has just one powerful core that can run anything, the 360 has 3 of those (even at the same frequency and very similar design). What if your game needs to run a lot of processes involving branch predictions (say a massive AI)? The PS3 will actually limit your parallel threading as the SPE's cannot run such processes. In essence you have to write code that PS3 will be "confortable" with. No point arguing whether you can figure out a way to speed up AI on an SPE - it is just one possible example.
Even worse, imagine everybody "does a Sony" and you have 3 consoles out with single-core + 7 SPE's each, but of course of different architecture, as it is usual. It will be a nightmare if the SPE's of each system are designed with different limitations. You would never be able to optimize for all systems with a similar code base.
While I am not a fan of the guy, calling Carmack "lazy" or "old generation" does not really fit the current situation on planet Earth.
I won't try to do a technical or short/long term cost analysis. Simply put, at least for non-HD content (especially DVD's), every Plasma I have seen looks much better than any LCD I have seen. For other uses it is another matter of course.
It is harder to cook on a gas stove and the experience is very dependent on your cookware. On all three stoves I have used so far, it was almost impossible to cook a particular dish that can be very easily burnt.
The thing is, I have used a modern electric stove for many years, and I also have used a gas stove for around 3 years, so I think I am judging from beyond the point of just being used to one kind of stove. My girlfriend is also greek and an amazing cook, but at times the gas stove has driven her to despair...
And let's not forget the gas bill! Ridiculously expensive!
As I don't have a choice though and I am stuck with gas, thanks for the tips, I'll give cast iron a try;)
I agree that gas stoves are much more picky about your cookware. However, I cannot relate to the rest of your experience. With an electric stove, the entire base of the pot is evenly heated, and you have a lot of control with repeatable results. I mean, there is a precise dial, how on earth can you tell me that it gives you less information than a flame? Although in both cases you determine the correct temperature by the way the food is cooking (but with an electric stove you can repeat it easily). Also, I have to correct your "glowing orang" comment, as on a ceramic glass electric stove (most modern ones) the elements glow immediatelly even at a very low heat setting.
Whoa "Electric burners suck...", I think you are missing something.
I have been living in the US for over three years and I still cannot get over from how backwards this whole cooking with gas situation is. The gas cookers definately do not give you control on how you cook. They are ok I guess for fast cooking, but for dishes that require slow cooking they are ill-suited. Even a low flame is usually too hot and too concentrated.
At first, I thought gas cookers are used even if they are an inconvenience for saving money off the electric bill. Then, I found out gas is outrageously expensive! In Brooklyn where I live now only the fees are $30/month, and it goes up from there! And let's not forget that some people (me for example) feel really uncofortable about the safety aspect of gas pipes running around the house.
Anyway, I have no idea what "Electric burners" you have tried, but the modern ones are safer, cheaper and much better at cooking demanding Greek specialties;)
I hope they don't also start dumping nuclear waste. We all know where that leads (and I am not talking about alternating funky / orchestral music sequences).
Agreed, this is one of the articles that prooves there is something wrong with the editorial system of slashdot. We do have all this fancy meta-moderation stuff, but how about some meta-editing? You can't have an army of editors, but how about an army of willing meta-editors that can vote off dupes and lame articles before they go public?
I don't want to start you with reverse Soviet Union jokes, but come on, unmanned reusable spacecraft should have been a reality for at least a couple of decades.
Exactly. Another example is the US Space program. The NASA 20 year plan during the 60's set 1979 as the target date for humans landing on Mars. Obviously, after the space race was considered won, funding was cut and man on Mars did not happen in 1979, but is instead re-scheduled for around the time when commercial fusion reactors become available...
Exactly. There are even countries where the Univesity as an institution is of such a high regard, that they it is considered an asylum and neither the Police nor the Military can enter a Campus under any pretense. My undergrad University was like that, a police officer wearing a uniform would not be allowed to even visit the campus, and still, there were no crimes at all. I can't say the same for my graduate institution in the US - and it was considered a rather safe one.
You have a point. I answered this on a message a little below, but usually very late posts on Slashdot don't get read, so I thought I would answer you directly.
So, the particular MobileQuerty thing is like Chewbacca living on Endor: it doesn't make any sense. There are other keyboard designs that have a superficial resemblance to qwerty with the only reason being avoiding the user dismissing it immediatelly as a strange novelty. However, they have non-symmetric partitions and some strategic but hard to notice at-first-glance changes (e.g. the G moves to the third row), that maximize the performance. I have used the EQ3 version and it was a easily perceivable improvement over phone+T9, especially for "weird" input.
So, you are right, the design linked on TFA does not make sense to be qwerty, unless you are into the art of confusing people. There are other designs that take advantage of qwerty's familiarity, but even those would be betting on ABC's familiarity if they were targeted to some European countries where SMS rulez over email.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read my responses to the two other replies of my post you will find your questions answered about how qualified I consider myself, what training I have and whether I am absolute about this or I can change my views pending new research.
... hat?
:)
I did not exactly play the "authority card". At least it was not my intention. You think it is wrong telling people that you have relative training and you aren't just pulling things out of your
So you don't have to (or do I expect you to) respect my "authoritay". But since you are into "authoritive sources" I guess you should check wikipedia (or elsewhere) for "IPCC".
As for the comment about how much more I have to learn about statistics, data analysis etc. I do hope you have several years of lab experience (in a University or other academic research environment) and that wasn't just a bluff, was it?
Ok. I have read various papers that show how human activity has affected the climate, which have lead me to formulate my opinions. However, as I reply to the special person below, I have not conducted research myself and it is not my particular field of expertise, so I might have missed something that could prove these papers inaccurate.
;)
Just point me to a solid research paper that you feel is more accurate and I might change my mind.
Of course from time to time there are some idiots^H^H^H^H^H^Hneo-Sophists who will state things like "the core of the moon is made of cheese" and just because nobody will care to take the time to refute them they will claim victory.
As a service to the rest of the readers though, I will have to say that sunspot activity is related to the amount of solar radiation that hits the earth. In fact more sunspots means higher radiation (even if it sounds counter-intuitive since the spots appear dark), thus higher temperature on the planet. Indeed, about 300 years ago the sunspot activity had virtualy stopped and the global temperature average had dropped almost by 1C.
It is only unfortunate for the parent that for the last 50 years the sunspot activity has been declining...
Utterly unrelated field? Right... If I am not a weather man (hint: Leipzig) I am not more qualified than the average Joe it seems.
Even if I have training in Atmospheric Physics and Meteorology (and actually I was pretty good at it) - I guess it is totally unrelated.
How about you adding a disclaimer "I am not really in a position to even understand what a 'climatologist' is, but I will toss in my flame, just because I feel insecure when people try to post widely accepted scientific facts."
No, I am not specifically a Climate Physicist nor have I carried out research in that field. However, I am certainly qualified to understand climatology papers.
Yes, indeed you could be wrong here and you forgot the "IANAP" disclaimer.
In fact, I Am A Physicist and I can tell you that what we don't know is exactly how much and how fast the temperature will rise, how the climate change will vary from place to place and how exactly all this will affect our world.
What we do know is that the temperature is rising and that for at least half a century we are the ones mainly responsible for that. We also do know that if we don't do something the consequences will be dire. Again, we don't know exactly how bad it will be, but that is no excuse for not doing anything.
If you want to know, the drop in temperature that starts the ice age and the warming after it are very slow processes like most others in nature. Forget about what you saw in "Ice Age", it was quite funny but the Earth will not freeze in a few days (and Scrat can't possibly survive after all that he goes through!).
Now, if I want to be more precise, the "unfreezing" part (that you inappropriately compared to the current problem of global warming) is slower than the "freezing", probably by a large margin. This is because temperature lowering at the start of the ice age is accelerated by the formation of snow and ice which increase the surface albedo and thus decrease the absorption rate of solar energy. But let's not get off topic.
The Earth is a very stable environment judging from how it has nurtured and preserved life for millions of years. So, for a temperature change so sudden as the one observed in recent years, a significant catastrophic event has to occur. Such an event could be a large meteor hitting the surface or a Supervolcano erruption. In our case, the catastrophy was the 20th century man.
I don't understand... He does say he believes in the end the earth will burn up, right? So it has to start warming up for that to happen, right? So what is his problem?
He is just jumping ahead and spoiling "An Inconvenient Truth 2", which will deal with what will happen in the end if we don't stop global warming. Wait for the release dude, and you will see the part about the Earth burning up!
I bet you weren't really confused, but had immediatelly figured out I meant to say "branching", right? ;)
You are missing the point.
He isn't being lazy and doesn't complain about parallel threading. Granted, the 360 is less parallel at 3-cores, but his complain is about the asymmetric aspect of the PS3's CPU design. In the end the PS3 has just one powerful core that can run anything, the 360 has 3 of those (even at the same frequency and very similar design). What if your game needs to run a lot of processes involving branch predictions (say a massive AI)? The PS3 will actually limit your parallel threading as the SPE's cannot run such processes. In essence you have to write code that PS3 will be "confortable" with. No point arguing whether you can figure out a way to speed up AI on an SPE - it is just one possible example.
Even worse, imagine everybody "does a Sony" and you have 3 consoles out with single-core + 7 SPE's each, but of course of different architecture, as it is usual. It will be a nightmare if the SPE's of each system are designed with different limitations. You would never be able to optimize for all systems with a similar code base.
While I am not a fan of the guy, calling Carmack "lazy" or "old generation" does not really fit the current situation on planet Earth.
Microsoft... good?
Slashdoters... confused?
Posts... few?
Reality... alternate?
I won't try to do a technical or short/long term cost analysis. Simply put, at least for non-HD content (especially DVD's), every Plasma I have seen looks much better than any LCD I have seen.
For other uses it is another matter of course.
Well, that is what I have been talking about ;)
;)
It is harder to cook on a gas stove and the experience is very dependent on your cookware. On all three stoves I have used so far, it was almost impossible to cook a particular dish that can be very easily burnt.
The thing is, I have used a modern electric stove for many years, and I also have used a gas stove for around 3 years, so I think I am judging from beyond the point of just being used to one kind of stove. My girlfriend is also greek and an amazing cook, but at times the gas stove has driven her to despair...
And let's not forget the gas bill! Ridiculously expensive!
As I don't have a choice though and I am stuck with gas, thanks for the tips, I'll give cast iron a try
I agree that gas stoves are much more picky about your cookware.
However, I cannot relate to the rest of your experience. With an electric stove, the entire base of the pot is evenly heated, and you have a lot of control with repeatable results. I mean, there is a precise dial, how on earth can you tell me that it gives you less information than a flame? Although in both cases you determine the correct temperature by the way the food is cooking (but with an electric stove you can repeat it easily). Also, I have to correct your "glowing orang" comment, as on a ceramic glass electric stove (most modern ones) the elements glow immediatelly even at a very low heat setting.
Whoa "Electric burners suck...", I think you are missing something.
;)
I have been living in the US for over three years and I still cannot get over from how backwards this whole cooking with gas situation is. The gas cookers definately do not give you control on how you cook. They are ok I guess for fast cooking, but for dishes that require slow cooking they are ill-suited. Even a low flame is usually too hot and too concentrated.
At first, I thought gas cookers are used even if they are an inconvenience for saving money off the electric bill. Then, I found out gas is outrageously expensive! In Brooklyn where I live now only the fees are $30/month, and it goes up from there! And let's not forget that some people (me for example) feel really uncofortable about the safety aspect of gas pipes running around the house.
Anyway, I have no idea what "Electric burners" you have tried, but the modern ones are safer, cheaper and much better at cooking demanding Greek specialties
Yeah, I remember that one. It came out just after Hello Wor;d.
We apologise for the inconvenience.
It is absurd to suggest that MS is a monopoly. Don't believe me? Let's do a quick poll: who in here is running Windows? ;)
Offtopic? You could call it unfunny, but not offtopic! Unless the mods today are under 30, thus not Space:1999-aware.
I hope they don't also start dumping nuclear waste. We all know where that leads (and I am not talking about alternating funky / orchestral music sequences).
Agreed, this is one of the articles that prooves there is something wrong with the editorial system of slashdot. We do have all this fancy meta-moderation stuff, but how about some meta-editing? You can't have an army of editors, but how about an army of willing meta-editors that can vote off dupes and lame articles before they go public?
Woops, I missed the proper capitalization. Going to fetch my asbestos armor for the flaming!
In Soviet Russia cosmonaut becomes you!
I don't want to start you with reverse Soviet Union jokes, but come on, unmanned reusable spacecraft should have been a reality for at least a couple of decades.
Exactly. Another example is the US Space program. The NASA 20 year plan during the 60's set 1979 as the target date for humans landing on Mars. Obviously, after the space race was considered won, funding was cut and man on Mars did not happen in 1979, but is instead re-scheduled for around the time when commercial fusion reactors become available...
Exactly. There are even countries where the Univesity as an institution is of such a high regard, that they it is considered an asylum and neither the Police nor the Military can enter a Campus under any pretense. My undergrad University was like that, a police officer wearing a uniform would not be allowed to even visit the campus, and still, there were no crimes at all. I can't say the same for my graduate institution in the US - and it was considered a rather safe one.
Sure beats the Cray-1! How is that for a definition? ;)
You have a point. I answered this on a message a little below, but usually very late posts on Slashdot don't get read, so I thought I would answer you directly.
So, the particular MobileQuerty thing is like Chewbacca living on Endor: it doesn't make any sense. There are other keyboard designs that have a superficial resemblance to qwerty with the only reason being avoiding the user dismissing it immediatelly as a strange novelty. However, they have non-symmetric partitions and some strategic but hard to notice at-first-glance changes (e.g. the G moves to the third row), that maximize the performance. I have used the EQ3 version and it was a easily perceivable improvement over phone+T9, especially for "weird" input.
So, you are right, the design linked on TFA does not make sense to be qwerty, unless you are into the art of confusing people. There are other designs that take advantage of qwerty's familiarity, but even those would be betting on ABC's familiarity if they were targeted to some European countries where SMS rulez over email.