The number of flops required for "supercomputer" status is constantly in flux, right? Yesterday's supercomputer is today's dual-core laptop. So says Gordon Moore.
In fact, this reminds me of old Apple ads for the G4 circa 2000 -- those had some sort of tagline to the effect of "a supercomputer on your desk," an assertion they were basing on a (who knows how old at the time) definition of a supercomputer as capable of doing a certain number of flops at which the G4 happened to be benchmarking.
Considering the number of flops a '70s Cray could churn out, we've all had "supercomputers" for years.
And they tell me that I slowly learned that I couldn't have everything right now and learned the valuable lesson of patience as well as an early understanding of moderation.
I'm glad they did. At such time as I may reproduce I intend to teach my offspring the same way.
I would be excited... if there were more details convincing me this is a 'breakthrough.'
The one thing that I think sets this apart from most "breakthroughs" is that they're demonstrating a prototype of an actual fabrication process rather than a prototype of a product that would then require plenty more research to figure out how to fabricate it.
In other words, it's one thing to demonstrate a prototype product, but an entirely other thing to demonstrate how you actually plan to mass produce that product, which this is!
Of course, it's yet another thing to actually produce your production equipment and drive adoption among manufacturers, but this announement is still one major step beyond most next-gen display announcements (SED, I'm looking at you...).
I honestly wouldn't mind the stringent notability requirements if WP had a system in place to prevent "non-notable" articles from being written in the first place. It's the way the site invites you to first do work and then have your work destroyed that's so maddening -- if you instead had to collect a few sources and then present them to one of the wikicrats for approval to create an article which you would then have a reasonable hope of WP keeping, I think there would be a lot less frustration and enmity among contributors to obscure topics.
Otherwise, it's like a city whose building permit system consists of "build first, then we'll check out your building to see if we need to demolish it."
Someday, at such time as your karma has reached the heretofore unattainable echelon of "godlike" with its +6 automatic bonus, you'll post a cleverly disguised link to "8tubgirls2cups." And then we'll all be sorry.
I know we shouldn't rely on/. for physics advice, but last weekend, on the advice of a misguided commenter, I kicked a deuterium atom down the linear accelerator in my backyard the wrong way, and hoo boy! I won't be hearing the last of that one for awhile.
OTR, despite its name, does nothing to prevent either you or your fellow conversant from keeping a record of the transcript. The point is that it's on your records only and no one else's.
Every time I try out a new expert system, it gets more depressing -- it honestly feels like no progress is happening in that market at all. I have yet to have a conversation with a computer that has been any more compelling than my first round with WinEliza on Windows 3.1 in 1995.
There's still no semblance of a short-term memory, even so much as continuity between responses. It always quickly becomes obvious that each response has been prepared verbatim beforehand by a human, that the system is still performing only a keyword-canned response routine, perhaps feeding in a few variable strings.
Today we have the same stone wheels we've had for decades, and the article suggests we'll have an internal combustion engine with antilock brakes and a hood ornament in another 20 years. We'll see.
Heck, even if you are a designer that was trained in the art of making things pretty but not really the art of making things usable by humans, you need to read this book. There are certainly enough of those in this industry.
What biological occurrence is it at the end of the first trimester that causes you to ascribe humanity to the fetus (already termed as such at 8 weeks) at that time?
...probably doesn't need a LAN today. They wirelessly connect to their.Mac iDisk or use the "Back to My Mac" feature in Leopard to transfer files from one computer to another over the WAN. It all mounts the same way as a local share, so what does the early-adopting casual user care?
Future businesses and power users won't abandon LANs because they need them. Casual users of the future, though, might just.
The police are allowed to tap regular phone lines because they don't have to intrude on your property to do it. Just like they can stake out your house from a van on the road.
Um, they are allowed to tap your regular phone lines or intrude on your property as long as they have a warrant. They can do both with one, and neither without one.
I've seen other projects before (ActiveCollab comes to mind) where the author forks the code to a proprietary 1.0 release, but in such cases, the previous release forks off to something else (ActiveCollab to ProjectPier).
While the author forking to proprietary is rather on the lame side, the idea of trying to cut off forks is simply inane.
I learned this lesson well in 2005 when I gleefully preordered and upgraded to Tiger only to find out that After Effects 5's non-standard use of Quicktime APIs resulted in highly unstable audio with the new version of QT that came with the OS. Just scrubbing video back and forth inside the app would produce Quicktime errors, and the only way to get a complete render was to render without audio and add the soundtrack in afterward.
I don't trust Adobe or Apple to be in sync on this stuff.
Seek out and hire people you can trust? Trust these managers to hire other trustworthy people? Give your employees incentive not to leak company data instead of passive-aggressively trying to preempt them?
Even highly capable local machines can still easily be rendered thin clients in a world where, regardless of any local OS, their functionality takes place all within a standardized browser environment. Distributing the server's processing load by offloading UI processes to the client makes sense -- while maintaining a consistent, centrally controlled application system.
Dear ISPs,
You are hereby notified that the content of this slashdot post is Copyright (c) 2008 by myself. I reserve all rights to this post. Please filter it appropriately to prevent duplication of this post.
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Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Given that you can get emergency service from Iridium for about $50 USD / month, there's really no reason at all any plane that flies over rural areas should be without one. $50 per month is essentially nothing added to the monthly costs of maintaining a civil aircraft.
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The number of flops required for "supercomputer" status is constantly in flux, right? Yesterday's supercomputer is today's dual-core laptop. So says Gordon Moore.
In fact, this reminds me of old Apple ads for the G4 circa 2000 -- those had some sort of tagline to the effect of "a supercomputer on your desk," an assertion they were basing on a (who knows how old at the time) definition of a supercomputer as capable of doing a certain number of flops at which the G4 happened to be benchmarking.
Considering the number of flops a '70s Cray could churn out, we've all had "supercomputers" for years.
And they tell me that I slowly learned that I couldn't have everything right now and learned the valuable lesson of patience as well as an early understanding of moderation.
I'm glad they did. At such time as I may reproduce I intend to teach my offspring the same way.
In other words, it's one thing to demonstrate a prototype product, but an entirely other thing to demonstrate how you actually plan to mass produce that product, which this is!
Of course, it's yet another thing to actually produce your production equipment and drive adoption among manufacturers, but this announement is still one major step beyond most next-gen display announcements (SED, I'm looking at you...).
I left for the same reasons. But:
I honestly wouldn't mind the stringent notability requirements if WP had a system in place to prevent "non-notable" articles from being written in the first place. It's the way the site invites you to first do work and then have your work destroyed that's so maddening -- if you instead had to collect a few sources and then present them to one of the wikicrats for approval to create an article which you would then have a reasonable hope of WP keeping, I think there would be a lot less frustration and enmity among contributors to obscure topics.
Otherwise, it's like a city whose building permit system consists of "build first, then we'll check out your building to see if we need to demolish it."
Someday, at such time as your karma has reached the heretofore unattainable echelon of "godlike" with its +6 automatic bonus, you'll post a cleverly disguised link to "8tubgirls2cups." And then we'll all be sorry.
Digg: Get dugg up for making explicit reference to boobies.
Slashdot: Get modded up for making obscure reference to boobies.
I know we shouldn't rely on /. for physics advice, but last weekend, on the advice of a misguided commenter, I kicked a deuterium atom down the linear accelerator in my backyard the wrong way, and hoo boy! I won't be hearing the last of that one for awhile.
OTR, despite its name, does nothing to prevent either you or your fellow conversant from keeping a record of the transcript. The point is that it's on your records only and no one else's.
Double whoosh!
Every time I try out a new expert system, it gets more depressing -- it honestly feels like no progress is happening in that market at all. I have yet to have a conversation with a computer that has been any more compelling than my first round with WinEliza on Windows 3.1 in 1995.
There's still no semblance of a short-term memory, even so much as continuity between responses. It always quickly becomes obvious that each response has been prepared verbatim beforehand by a human, that the system is still performing only a keyword-canned response routine, perhaps feeding in a few variable strings.
Today we have the same stone wheels we've had for decades, and the article suggests we'll have an internal combustion engine with antilock brakes and a hood ornament in another 20 years. We'll see.
Just you wait until your Companion Cube empire meets the crushing might of my race of fire beings!
Yes! Let's take it a step further though: The legislators that vandalize an otherwise good bill get their IPs banned.
"I will always preview my HTML at /." 200 times.
by Donald Norman. If you're not trained as a designer and are being asked to design, this book is the most important thing you can read. In it is nothing about how to make things pretty, and everything about how to make things usable by humans.
Heck, even if you are a designer that was trained in the art of making things pretty but not really the art of making things usable by humans, you need to read this book. There are certainly enough of those in this industry.
The Sherman act? It's just a damn piece of paper!
What biological occurrence is it at the end of the first trimester that causes you to ascribe humanity to the fetus (already termed as such at 8 weeks) at that time?
...probably doesn't need a LAN today. They wirelessly connect to their .Mac iDisk or use the "Back to My Mac" feature in Leopard to transfer files from one computer to another over the WAN. It all mounts the same way as a local share, so what does the early-adopting casual user care?
Future businesses and power users won't abandon LANs because they need them. Casual users of the future, though, might just.
I've seen other projects before (ActiveCollab comes to mind) where the author forks the code to a proprietary 1.0 release, but in such cases, the previous release forks off to something else (ActiveCollab to ProjectPier).
While the author forking to proprietary is rather on the lame side, the idea of trying to cut off forks is simply inane.
I learned this lesson well in 2005 when I gleefully preordered and upgraded to Tiger only to find out that After Effects 5's non-standard use of Quicktime APIs resulted in highly unstable audio with the new version of QT that came with the OS. Just scrubbing video back and forth inside the app would produce Quicktime errors, and the only way to get a complete render was to render without audio and add the soundtrack in afterward.
I don't trust Adobe or Apple to be in sync on this stuff.
Seek out and hire people you can trust? Trust these managers to hire other trustworthy people? Give your employees incentive not to leak company data instead of passive-aggressively trying to preempt them?
You hit the nail on the head.
Even highly capable local machines can still easily be rendered thin clients in a world where, regardless of any local OS, their functionality takes place all within a standardized browser environment. Distributing the server's processing load by offloading UI processes to the client makes sense -- while maintaining a consistent, centrally controlled application system.
I just tried that one on my HD-DVD copy of Enchanted and it TOTALLY DIDN'T WORK!
Given that you can get emergency service from Iridium for about $50 USD / month, there's really no reason at all any plane that flies over rural areas should be without one. $50 per month is essentially nothing added to the monthly costs of maintaining a civil aircraft.