"God performed surgery when he removed Adam's rib, so my profession is indeed the oldest" said the doctor. "But before that God performed feats of engineering to create the Earth from void and chaos, so my profession must be the oldest" countered the engineer. The programmer looked at them contemptuously and replied: "gee, where do you think void and chaos came from?"
The article mentions that the cell lasts only a few months, after which it is "easily replaced". Crystalline solar panels can last over 30 years. Combine this with my skepticism that his cell can make 18W (may be it's 18mW?:) and you have one rotting deal.
Why would this be surprizing? The scientific method and the belief that your beliefs need to be examined and their truth verified are recent inventions. For most of human history the vast majority always believed what they were told. As rationality is dying out, due to schooling and various other factors, so is skepticism and science. As time goes on, we can all expect people to increase blind faith and achieve whatever natural healing their bodies can provide.
Concepts and, therefore, language, are primarily a tool of cognition -- not communication, as is usually assumed. Communication is merely the consequence, not the cause nor the primary purpose of concept formation -- a crucial consequence, of invaluable importance to men, but still only a consequence. Cognition precedes communication; the necessary precondition of communication is that one have something to communicate. The primary purpose of concepts and of language is to provide man with a system of cognitive classification and organization, which enables him to acquire knowledge on an unlimited scale; this means: to keep order in man's mind and enable him to think. - Ayn Rand, "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology"
As a continuation of the above and related to this thread's subject, I would suggest that the form of your language really does matter, because it shapes the way you think. Texting limits the conceptual breadth of the language, which in turn limits its users' capacity for intelligent thought.
> But can other operation systems do that when running in "NON fullscrenn" mode?
That I don't know. Win32 protocol is in principle no different. However, "other OS's don't do it" is not an excuse. Retrace check is not hard to implement; when working with a framebuffer driver on the Linux console, you almost always have it. It's the X server that's hard to hack, and that alone is a good reason to replace it.
> And while we are talking about it does it matter anymore, now that anyone is using lcd screens.
Flicker occurs no matter what kind of screen you are using. The problem is that if you draw half a frame during one retrace, and the other half during the next one, you'll be able to see the first half alone for a while. Yes, LCDs don't have an actual "ray", but the video card has to send pixels at some predetermined intervals, which for a DVI connection is fixed at 60Hz. This makes the application window constantly flicker whenever something changes. There are some people who can't see 60Hz flicker and are comfortable with a 60Hz CRT picture with a white background; for me, that setup causes instant physical pain. On an LCD it's merely very annoying.
> Don't the application(Or atleast the gfx subsystem) need to know the screen response time in order to swap buffer when all pixels have changed color.
Yes, and all the video cards provide this information. Heck, thirty years ago, in DOS, you could get this from most cards. There was this game, Jazz Jackrabbit, that had scrolling synched to the retrace and man, it was smooth! It's really something you have to see to appreciate; the effect is hard to describe, but it's awesome.
The X API is totally unsuitable for writing flicker-free applications. The main problem is the draw-as-you-go approach foisted on you. There are no frame breaks and no way to tell the server when it's ok to flush the graphics to the card. Sure, you can write ugly workarounds. OpenGL implements its own drawlists and it's possible to get it to dump them in sync with vretrace. But that does not help someone working with the X protocol. And outside OpenGL it isn't even possible at all, because current X still does not provide any way to detect a retrace; all that code is hidden in the binary GL blob drivers. XSync extension was intended exactly for this, it has been around for over 20 years and is STILL not working!
Yes, I'd dearly love to rewrite X. Use drawlists, like OpenGL does, the better to integrate with acceleration pipes. Double-buffer, or at least make sure no drawing is done between retraces. But everybody is so stuck on preserving X, that this is very very hard. Yes, kernel support for R600 is coming, but that isn't going to be an actual driver; it's just a forwarding interface to the card's IO ports with locking. I'd still have to figure out the formats it wants and write a 3D driver for every card. And heaven forbid you mention that 3D drivers should be in the kernel; you get all kinds of people saying that it would make them hard to port. Well, gee people; the current state of affairs makes those ugly undocumented drivers in X damn hard to port too!
Yeah, I'm worked up. The state of graphics support on Linux just makes me tear my hear out.
Now, what would be even more memorable is pedestrians shouting ad slogans as they die. "Aaahh, I should have drank Coca-Cola-a-a-a" or "Oh, no! My Nike shoes!" or "Whew! Missed me like a little Fiat, you loser!"
> Bell's Theorem is a result that shows that a local realistic hidden variables theory > cannot reproduce the results of quantum mechanics for an entangled quantum state.
Another thing they don't tell you about Bell's theorem is that it's for particles. The reason quantum mechanics violates the inequality is that photons are waves. Look at the calculations done for the Aspect experiment; the classical calculation makes the assumption that photons are particles and scattering probability is linear by angle. The experiment, thus clearly shows that photons are NOT particles, and that's ALL. If you discard the idea of photons as particles and use Beer's law to calculate what passes through your mirrors, then the results will match the quantum mechanical prediction (because a field intensity probability function will have the same value as the field intensity function if you know what it is).
It's interesting to see how the electrons bunch up at the ends. The aromatic delocalization clearly equalizes the energy levels of the bonds, making the entire molecule behave like a conductor, and concentrate charge at the extremes. Just as in a metal, electrons loosely float in the conduction band, it looks they do the same in pentacene, illustrating why graphite is such a good conductor.
Back during World War I, the Germans used hot air balloons as artillery spotters. One of the major jobs for airplanes in those days was shooting them down. Of course, since they couldn't fly all that high (or all that well), they were quite vulnerable to anti-aircraft guns. And, then there was the Red Baron and his flying circus...
Every man has a set of values that define his moral code; actions that create more of what he values are good, the actions that destroy what he values are evil. In another post in this thread you'll see evil defined as "not caring for the good of society", which exemplifies the altruist value of the "common good" and the subsequent definition of "actions that benefit society/others" as good and "actions that harm society/others" as evil. Naturally, people can have different values, which lead to different definitions of what is good or evil.
As xkcd already pointed out, developers seem to be out of touch with reality here. How about implementing KMS for a flicker free boot instead? Or heck, what about allowing X applications to sync to vertical retrace? That last one has been in the pipeline for some 20 years, for God's sake!
Well, now, I disagree that such an attitude is common. I have never received such treatment by any project maintainer and would not myself do it for my projects. Whenever someone contacts me about a project I maintain, I always reply, even if it's to a total n00b.
Maybe in Roman times it did. These days it means "drastically reduced", or perhaps "down to one-tenth". Meaning of words changes. Get the f*@k over it already!
What a great way to fix a recession caused by people who got into too much debt buying houses they could not afford! Let's make them get rid of their cars and buy new ones for more debt! Credit is the fuel on which the economy runs, you know. If these people stop spending, then by golly, we need to give them more money so that they can KEEP spending DAMMIT!
You're forgetting spread spectrum techniques and encryption. Surely, any advanced civilization will use both and thus become completely invisible to us.
> Are you proposing that there is some sort of a universal law of nature that decrees no civilization anywhere in the universe > will make detectable or recognizable signals of any kind?
Actually there is, it's technological progress. We already are at the point that almost none of our signals are detectable. You see, all advanced civilizations are going to use something like our digital spread spectrum modulation techniques, which require a specifically coded receiver to find. Without knowing the right code, all transmissions we produce are indistinguishable from noise, by design. It's also extremely efficient, so it's guaranteed to be adopted.
If you actually read the report, you'll see that he and his friends are mainly concerned with cost. Twitter is not used because sending a text message to twitter costs money, and, since nobody reads their profiles anyway, it's better to send the message to friends directly. The rest of the report is on the same theme: teenagers don't want to spend any money. This is certainly not a new trend; when I was in high school, my allowance was certainly inadequate to subscribe to expensive services, buy computer games, or expensive gadgets. I don't see why anyone is surprized that this is all still true today.
Funny how somebody has to write network card drivers for every OS your browser runs on. It's a wonder why nobody has considered putting those drivers in the browser instead.
Neither am I. However, see section 401, where you'll find that if you don't buy health insurance, you have to pay an extra 2% in taxes. Ain't income redistribution larceny grand?
We are parents. Deciding what is best for our children, until they are old enough to decide what is best for themselves, is what we are supposed to do. Perhaps our decisions will not be perfect, but that is not a reason to avoid making those decisions. And if not making a decision makes your child worse off, such as if you can choose to make him smart but do not do so, then it makes you a bad parent in his eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
"God performed surgery when he removed Adam's rib, so my profession is indeed the oldest" said the doctor. "But before that God performed feats of engineering to create the Earth from void and chaos, so my profession must be the oldest" countered the engineer. The programmer looked at them contemptuously and replied: "gee, where do you think void and chaos came from?"
There is a lie in here somewhere...
The article mentions that the cell lasts only a few months, after which it is "easily replaced". Crystalline solar panels can last over 30 years. Combine this with my skepticism that his cell can make 18W (may be it's 18mW? :) and you have one rotting deal.
Why would this be surprizing? The scientific method and the belief that your beliefs need to be examined and their truth verified are recent inventions. For most of human history the vast majority always believed what they were told. As rationality is dying out, due to schooling and various other factors, so is skepticism and science. As time goes on, we can all expect people to increase blind faith and achieve whatever natural healing their bodies can provide.
As a continuation of the above and related to this thread's subject, I would suggest that the form of your language really does matter, because it shapes the way you think. Texting limits the conceptual breadth of the language, which in turn limits its users' capacity for intelligent thought.
> But can other operation systems do that when running in "NON fullscrenn" mode?
That I don't know. Win32 protocol is in principle no different. However, "other OS's don't do it" is not an excuse. Retrace check is not hard to implement; when working with a framebuffer driver on the Linux console, you almost always have it. It's the X server that's hard to hack, and that alone is a good reason to replace it.
> And while we are talking about it does it matter anymore, now that anyone is using lcd screens.
Flicker occurs no matter what kind of screen you are using. The problem is that if you draw half a frame during one retrace, and the other half during the next one, you'll be able to see the first half alone for a while. Yes, LCDs don't have an actual "ray", but the video card has to send pixels at some predetermined intervals, which for a DVI connection is fixed at 60Hz. This makes the application window constantly flicker whenever something changes. There are some people who can't see 60Hz flicker and are comfortable with a 60Hz CRT picture with a white background; for me, that setup causes instant physical pain. On an LCD it's merely very annoying.
> Don't the application(Or atleast the gfx subsystem) need to know the screen response time in order to swap buffer when all pixels have changed color.
Yes, and all the video cards provide this information. Heck, thirty years ago, in DOS, you could get this from most cards. There was this game, Jazz Jackrabbit, that had scrolling synched to the retrace and man, it was smooth! It's really something you have to see to appreciate; the effect is hard to describe, but it's awesome.
The X API is totally unsuitable for writing flicker-free applications. The main problem is the draw-as-you-go approach foisted on you. There are no frame breaks and no way to tell the server when it's ok to flush the graphics to the card. Sure, you can write ugly workarounds. OpenGL implements its own drawlists and it's possible to get it to dump them in sync with vretrace. But that does not help someone working with the X protocol. And outside OpenGL it isn't even possible at all, because current X still does not provide any way to detect a retrace; all that code is hidden in the binary GL blob drivers. XSync extension was intended exactly for this, it has been around for over 20 years and is STILL not working!
Yes, I'd dearly love to rewrite X. Use drawlists, like OpenGL does, the better to integrate with acceleration pipes. Double-buffer, or at least make sure no drawing is done between retraces. But everybody is so stuck on preserving X, that this is very very hard. Yes, kernel support for R600 is coming, but that isn't going to be an actual driver; it's just a forwarding interface to the card's IO ports with locking. I'd still have to figure out the formats it wants and write a 3D driver for every card. And heaven forbid you mention that 3D drivers should be in the kernel; you get all kinds of people saying that it would make them hard to port. Well, gee people; the current state of affairs makes those ugly undocumented drivers in X damn hard to port too!
Yeah, I'm worked up. The state of graphics support on Linux just makes me tear my hear out.
Now, what would be even more memorable is pedestrians shouting ad slogans as they die. "Aaahh, I should have drank Coca-Cola-a-a-a" or "Oh, no! My Nike shoes!" or "Whew! Missed me like a little Fiat, you loser!"
> Bell's Theorem is a result that shows that a local realistic hidden variables theory
> cannot reproduce the results of quantum mechanics for an entangled quantum state.
Another thing they don't tell you about Bell's theorem is that it's for particles. The reason quantum mechanics violates the inequality is that photons are waves. Look at the calculations done for the Aspect experiment; the classical calculation makes the assumption that photons are particles and scattering probability is linear by angle. The experiment, thus clearly shows that photons are NOT particles, and that's ALL. If you discard the idea of photons as particles and use Beer's law to calculate what passes through your mirrors, then the results will match the quantum mechanical prediction (because a field intensity probability function will have the same value as the field intensity function if you know what it is).
It's interesting to see how the electrons bunch up at the ends. The aromatic delocalization clearly equalizes the energy levels of the bonds, making the entire molecule behave like a conductor, and concentrate charge at the extremes. Just as in a metal, electrons loosely float in the conduction band, it looks they do the same in pentacene, illustrating why graphite is such a good conductor.
Back during World War I, the Germans used hot air balloons as artillery spotters. One of the major jobs for airplanes in those days was shooting them down. Of course, since they couldn't fly all that high (or all that well), they were quite vulnerable to anti-aircraft guns. And, then there was the Red Baron and his flying circus...
Every man has a set of values that define his moral code; actions that create more of what he values are good, the actions that destroy what he values are evil. In another post in this thread you'll see evil defined as "not caring for the good of society", which exemplifies the altruist value of the "common good" and the subsequent definition of "actions that benefit society/others" as good and "actions that harm society/others" as evil. Naturally, people can have different values, which lead to different definitions of what is good or evil.
As xkcd already pointed out, developers seem to be out of touch with reality here. How about implementing KMS for a flicker free boot instead? Or heck, what about allowing X applications to sync to vertical retrace? That last one has been in the pipeline for some 20 years, for God's sake!
I use Konqueror, which is certainly not beta, and it crashes all the time. Twice in the last hour, in fact.
Well, now, I disagree that such an attitude is common. I have never received such treatment by any project maintainer and would not myself do it for my projects. Whenever someone contacts me about a project I maintain, I always reply, even if it's to a total n00b.
Maybe in Roman times it did. These days it means "drastically reduced", or perhaps "down to one-tenth". Meaning of words changes. Get the f*@k over it already!
What a great way to fix a recession caused by people who got into too much debt buying houses they could not afford! Let's make them get rid of their cars and buy new ones for more debt! Credit is the fuel on which the economy runs, you know. If these people stop spending, then by golly, we need to give them more money so that they can KEEP spending DAMMIT!
You're forgetting spread spectrum techniques and encryption. Surely, any advanced civilization will use both and thus become completely invisible to us.
> Are you proposing that there is some sort of a universal law of nature that decrees no civilization anywhere in the universe
> will make detectable or recognizable signals of any kind?
Actually there is, it's technological progress. We already are at the point that almost none of our signals are detectable. You see, all advanced civilizations are going to use something like our digital spread spectrum modulation techniques, which require a specifically coded receiver to find. Without knowing the right code, all transmissions we produce are indistinguishable from noise, by design. It's also extremely efficient, so it's guaranteed to be adopted.
If you actually read the report, you'll see that he and his friends are mainly concerned with cost. Twitter is not used because sending a text message to twitter costs money, and, since nobody reads their profiles anyway, it's better to send the message to friends directly. The rest of the report is on the same theme: teenagers don't want to spend any money. This is certainly not a new trend; when I was in high school, my allowance was certainly inadequate to subscribe to expensive services, buy computer games, or expensive gadgets. I don't see why anyone is surprized that this is all still true today.
We named our city that because we have so many LAN parties here.
Funny how somebody has to write network card drivers for every OS your browser runs on. It's a wonder why nobody has considered putting those drivers in the browser instead.
If graphics drivers were implemented in the kernel instead of the X server, this problem wouldn't have existed in the first place.
Neither am I. However, see section 401, where you'll find that if you don't buy health insurance, you have to pay an extra 2% in taxes. Ain't income redistribution larceny grand?
> Basically, who are we to decide what is best?
We are parents. Deciding what is best for our children, until they are old enough to decide what is best for themselves, is what we are supposed to do. Perhaps our decisions will not be perfect, but that is not a reason to avoid making those decisions. And if not making a decision makes your child worse off, such as if you can choose to make him smart but do not do so, then it makes you a bad parent in his eyes.