It's great that somebody is working on hardware graphics, but since I'm on Linux, I pretty much can't use any of it. Sure, you can use OpenGL and binary drivers, but if you are not in X, you get no hardware acceleration at all, aside from bitblt and a maybe a few simple primitives. So I'm just skimming through all those descriptions, wishing, "boy, I wish I could use this!"...
Couldn't you just print out your contact information and bind it into a nice little book? Surely, you do not acquire new ones so frequently that you can't type them in at your home PC at the end of the day. Writing in a pocket calendar is no harder than using the darn stylus. And you get free heuristic searching with only about 4 seeks per access thanks to those letter tabs.
Russian PhDs have a lot less difficulty finding employment in their field. After all, it is usually through such employment that they were able to leave Russia in the first place. And with the high quality of Russian education (well, it used to be, at least in the big cities), they would likely be preferred over US candidates.
> when they can feed a family of 10 on 10K a year and have housing
You might survive just fine on 10K a year as long as you don't have children. Just let them outbreed you and see how they like a world where nobody knows how a computer works, how to make steel, or refine oil.
> An economy where no jobs are going overseas or > coming back is a lifeless, growthless economy.
Not quite. Such an economy simply has a lower cost of living than that in other countries. If it didn't cost so much to obtain shelter and food ($700-$900/month in any place close to a good job), people would have been happy to accept lower wages.
But they are not outlawing exponentially self-replicating nanomachines. They are saying that such machines are impossible to build, while fervently hoping that all the terrorists in the world would read it and say "gosh darn it! I guess I'll have to abandon my gray goo research now. Can't do the impossible..."
I can't tell you how many times I've seen bugs make software do things it was not designed to do. Sure, a good programmer can avoid some such issues, but most programmers are not good these days.
> if the raw materials are not available in the right form, they cannot replicate.
Sure, but what if your machine uses cellulose as the raw material? You know some idiot will do that. And some evil mad scientist is certainly going to try.
> Self-replicating machines are prohibitively complex.
> an evil mad scientist would not have the funding > or resources to develop a self-replicating machine.
I should remind you that evil mad scientists are not necessarily getting paid for their research. Never underestimate just how cheap research can get when you don't have to pay for the researcher's time. If someone estimated how much money it would take to develop the theory of relativity, I bet nobody could afford to do it either.
> The real problem with nano machines would be simple design flaws, not replication.
Would you consider an infinite loop in the replication routine a design flaw?
> But a decade of testing on any given design would happen before it was used in humans.
Unless it happens to be designed by a mad evil scientist who tells it to look for healthy cells and kill them. Remember, there is a lot of hate in the world. And to say that nobody but the government is capable of developing nanobots, is to say that all researchers are either hate-free or stupid. At this point I would like to mention the iraqi scientists who made WMDs in Iraq, and let you decide into which category they fall.
> Now you need a ridiculously complex method of searching twenty-six separate databases
Not at all; the point was check your search key and direct the search to the machine that owns the database containing the entries matching that range of the key. Each server is still searching its own database, but the database is 1/26th in size and the incoming requests are only 1/26th in volume. I think that would more than compensate for the extra link, which can be over a very high speed cable. You might not win much in latency, but you will definitely win in throughput and cost.
> Large, monolithic OLTP databases, such as the ones > that banks and telcos use. When you have to track > every single phone call made or received by every > cellphone subscriber in the US in one huge billing database
Why not split the database into segments, like alphabetically into a,b,c,...,z customers, and then put each one on a separate PC with one master PC routing the calls? I bet it would be just as fast, if not faster than your monolithic system.
As long as we are looking at people associated with particular software, I think Richard Stallman is far scarier looking than Steve Ballmer, in addition to also being wobbling and flabby. And Linus is already approaching the "wobbling, flabby, sweating body" condition.
You know, if you keep sending "Hi. How are you?" to everyone you see, eventually you'll make a few new friends. Some of them might even be beautiful women.
> want to debug an OSS app and the docs (if there > are any) aren't much help? you go to Google Groups, right?
Wrong. You email the package maintainer. Most people never debug an app that doesn't work; they just drop it and go look for another one that does. Or they write something themseleves. Or they find a workaround that doesn't require any such software at all. But if you do want the package fixed, take my advice and email the maintainer. The maintainers are lonely people, who rarely get any feedback on the project. They'll be very happy to talk to you. Don't assume that all OSS projects are busy like mozilla or gcc; most would cherish and need your bug reports. Most of those projects are not talked about in Google groups. Most people have never even heard of Google groups.
I was pretty fed up with autoconf myself, and wrote a little C app to emulate it. Initial./configure time dropped to a second and reconfigure is instantaneous. I would recommend it for your simpler projects:
bsconf.c
and
bsconf.h,
the latter being the configuration file.
A deceleration period does not contradict my hypothesis. Here's my version of what happened: start with the big bang singularity and explode it. Because all that mass is now gone, space suddenly uncurves and expands outward at the speed of light. All the energy from the explosion is also moving outward in that outward moving space. At first, there is a lot of wraparound and energy density is very high, then it decreases as space expands. At some point it is cool enough for matter to form. Matter is moving outward through expanding space. This matter curves space and begins to slow down space expansion. At the same time gravity starts slowing down the matter's movement through space. This is that deceleration period. At this point space expansion is decelerating and outward velocity of matter is also slowing down. Then stars form and start converting matter into energy, uncurving space. As more and more stars form, space expansion resumes and finally breaks even with the outward movement of matter. This breakeven point apparently occured about 6 billion years ago.
Here it is. And all without a single reference to some mysterious "dark" stuff, which somebody just pulled out of thin air.
And here's what happens next: when the big stars burn out, acceleration will decrease dramatically. Both space and matter will still move outward until the slower stars burn out. Then space expansion will stop and contraction will start as black holes consume energy emitted by all those stars. Then things will be pretty static for a while, with black holes flying around here and there. Eventually, gravity will pull them together and merge them into the big bang singularity, at which point everything starts over.
Slashdot Mirror
It's great that somebody is working on hardware graphics, but since I'm on Linux, I pretty much can't use any of it. Sure, you can use OpenGL and binary drivers, but if you are not in X, you get no hardware acceleration at all, aside from bitblt and a maybe a few simple primitives. So I'm just skimming through all those descriptions, wishing, "boy, I wish I could use this!"...
Couldn't you just print out your contact information and bind it into a nice little book? Surely, you do not acquire new ones so frequently that you can't type them in at your home PC at the end of the day. Writing in a pocket calendar is no harder than using the darn stylus. And you get free heuristic searching with only about 4 seeks per access thanks to those letter tabs.
Russian PhDs have a lot less difficulty finding employment in their field. After all, it is usually through such employment that they were able to leave Russia in the first place. And with the high quality of Russian education (well, it used to be, at least in the big cities), they would likely be preferred over US candidates.
There is no reason to be preaching to the choir.
I wonder what kind of an adventure game it is given that the developer's name is Randy Hyde.
I'd say that depends greatly on the size of your wave...
> when they can feed a family of 10 on 10K a year and have housing
You might survive just fine on 10K a year as long as you don't have children. Just let them outbreed you and see how they like a world where nobody knows how a computer works, how to make steel, or refine oil.
> An economy where no jobs are going overseas or
> coming back is a lifeless, growthless economy.
Not quite. Such an economy simply has a lower cost of living than that in other countries. If it didn't cost so much to obtain shelter and food ($700-$900/month in any place close to a good job), people would have been happy to accept lower wages.
But they are not outlawing exponentially self-replicating nanomachines. They are saying that such machines are impossible to build, while fervently hoping that all the terrorists in the world would read it and say "gosh darn it! I guess I'll have to abandon my gray goo research now. Can't do the impossible..."
> Machines only do what you design them to.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen bugs make software do things it was not designed to do. Sure, a good programmer can avoid some such issues, but most programmers are not good these days.
> if the raw materials are not available in the right form, they cannot replicate.
Sure, but what if your machine uses cellulose as the raw material? You know some idiot will do that. And some evil mad scientist is certainly going to try.
> Self-replicating machines are prohibitively complex.
You must have missed this article
> an evil mad scientist would not have the funding
> or resources to develop a self-replicating machine.
I should remind you that evil mad scientists are not necessarily getting paid for their research. Never underestimate just how cheap research can get when you don't have to pay for the researcher's time. If someone estimated how much money it would take to develop the theory of relativity, I bet nobody could afford to do it either.
> The real problem with nano machines would be simple design flaws, not replication.
Would you consider an infinite loop in the replication routine a design flaw?
> But a decade of testing on any given design would happen before it was used in humans.
Unless it happens to be designed by a mad evil scientist who tells it to look for healthy cells and kill them. Remember, there is a lot of hate in the world. And to say that nobody but the government is capable of developing nanobots, is to say that all researchers are either hate-free or stupid. At this point I would like to mention the iraqi scientists who made WMDs in Iraq, and let you decide into which category they fall.
> Now you need a ridiculously complex method of searching twenty-six separate databases
Not at all; the point was check your search key and direct the search to the machine that owns the database containing the entries matching that range of the key. Each server is still searching its own database, but the database is 1/26th in size and the incoming requests are only 1/26th in volume. I think that would more than compensate for the extra link, which can be over a very high speed cable. You might not win much in latency, but you will definitely win in throughput and cost.
> Large, monolithic OLTP databases, such as the ones
> that banks and telcos use. When you have to track
> every single phone call made or received by every
> cellphone subscriber in the US in one huge billing database
Why not split the database into segments, like alphabetically into a,b,c,...,z customers, and then put each one on a separate PC with one master PC routing the calls? I bet it would be just as fast, if not faster than your monolithic system.
As long as we are looking at people associated with particular software, I think Richard Stallman is far scarier looking than Steve Ballmer, in addition to also being wobbling and flabby. And Linus is already approaching the "wobbling, flabby, sweating body" condition.
> Have you any clue as to how many years more
> advanced than Linux Solaris is at the high end
Nope. Could you please enlighten us? I have never been to the high end.
You sure can sqeeze an orange faster than you can sqeeze an apple.
I am sure there is a place for a pony in there somewhere.
Look in the medicine cabinet. The rest of the game looks no more obvious to me.
> quit
:quit works just fine and so does :exit
:q
:q prompts you is that you haven't saved
:q! done :q!!!!!!! dammit! close editor freak
:q! or :wq would do the trick.
In my vim,
Are you still in insert mode?
>
The reason
your file yet. It is no diffierent from those annoying "Are you sure?" dialogs.
>
Surely, just typing
You know, if you keep sending "Hi. How are you?" to everyone you see, eventually you'll make a few new friends. Some of them might even be beautiful women.
Look at this city design. Instead of trying to create better routing of commuters, it eliminates the whole problem of commuting.
Man, that can really chew you up...
> because Tick and Tock have been corrected for
> cosmic clock drift, while the gps clocks have not been so adjusted.
I am sure you are reaping great benefits from knowing what time it is to sixteen decimal places.
> want to debug an OSS app and the docs (if there
> are any) aren't much help? you go to Google Groups, right?
Wrong. You email the package maintainer. Most people never debug an app that doesn't work; they just drop it and go look for another one that does. Or they write something themseleves. Or they find a workaround that doesn't require any such software at all. But if you do want the package fixed, take my advice and email the maintainer. The maintainers are lonely people, who rarely get any feedback on the project. They'll be very happy to talk to you. Don't assume that all OSS projects are busy like mozilla or gcc; most would cherish and need your bug reports. Most of those projects are not talked about in Google groups. Most people have never even heard of Google groups.
I was pretty fed up with autoconf myself, and wrote a little C app to emulate it. Initial ./configure time dropped to a second and reconfigure is instantaneous. I would recommend it for your simpler projects:
bsconf.c
and
bsconf.h,
the latter being the configuration file.
A deceleration period does not contradict my hypothesis. Here's my version of what happened: start with the big bang singularity and explode it. Because all that mass is now gone, space suddenly uncurves and expands outward at the speed of light. All the energy from the explosion is also moving outward in that outward moving space. At first, there is a lot of wraparound and energy density is very high, then it decreases as space expands. At some point it is cool enough for matter to form. Matter is moving outward through expanding space. This matter curves space and begins to slow down space expansion. At the same time gravity starts slowing down the matter's movement through space. This is that deceleration period. At this point space expansion is decelerating and outward velocity of matter is also slowing down. Then stars form and start converting matter into energy, uncurving space. As more and more stars form, space expansion resumes and finally breaks even with the outward movement of matter. This breakeven point apparently occured about 6 billion years ago.
Here it is. And all without a single reference to some mysterious "dark" stuff, which somebody just pulled out of thin air.
And here's what happens next: when the big stars burn out, acceleration will decrease dramatically. Both space and matter will still move outward until the slower stars burn out. Then space expansion will stop and contraction will start as black holes consume energy emitted by all those stars. Then things will be pretty static for a while, with black holes flying around here and there. Eventually, gravity will pull them together and merge them into the big bang singularity, at which point everything starts over.