Hm, I disagree. Science does not start from evidence. It begins from the irrational, from the formation of the models and language used to describe an observer's sensations. Evidence is used only in a model's falsification, made possible by science's crucial premise--the existence of a predictive, deterministic model. That is a belief, by the way, not something that can be proven (neglecting omniscience).
So it's not that she's discarding evidence or reason. She just may not share the same basic beliefs. Neither side is provably correct; moreover, that foundation confines both your knowledge and hers.
That said, without some of us believing in predictability, I wouldn't have a job!;-)
Not all sites are like that, though. For example, HardOCP attempts to find the highest settings a card can handle while still achieving some minimum average frame rate. You still can't take the numbers as indicators for your particular system, though, unless all of your other components have comparable performance to their test rig.
Haha, I'm sounding like an asshole, I think. I just mean to say that the class really isn't so advanced that it should be graduate-level (with the assumption that graduates should have already seen Verilog and done hardware design--at Berkeley, we have several undergrad classes with FPGA design projects).
I'd post links to what we've done, but it's not finished yet. It's BSD-licensed but hiding in a repository that doesn't (yet) give access to the public.
Hm... I was probably a little confusing. CS 150 is done over 10 weeks or so with teams of 2 students, but the projects are probably larger. Slapping a NIOS core on an FPGA and having it run C code is hardly much of a hardware project. I will give them credit for having something to show in 4 weeks, but I'd expect graduate students wouldn't have any trouble with that unless this were their first hardware project. (Students always underestimate the integration step)
As far as being busy with other crap, that's the same for every student.
Re:Still not safe to use Suse of any sort
on
openSUSE Launches 11.1
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· Score: 4, Informative
Well, while you go on in fear, I'm going to continue using what I've found to be the most polished distribution for KDE4 users (out of Fedora, openSUSE, Kubuntu, and Debian). Fedora annoyingly included a pre-release version of xorg that didn't have driver support from nvidia or amd. I have no idea what's up with Kubuntu; the maintainers need to work a little harder at making it stable and fast. Debian is just missing some of the nicer GUI tools for system administration.
If you've got a better distribution to try, I'd love to hear it. (I'm really happy we have KVM ^_^)
Graduate-level? Why? I would congratulate the students on nice projects if this were their first hardware course, but they seem too simple for graduate students.
At Cal, we have an undergraduate course with a project of similar complexity for a given timeframe (CS 150). The only reason for the length is to become acclimated to FPGA design.
Once you get past the basics, you can do interesting projects. This semester, six undergraduates (including myself) worked on some much larger projects--a SPARC CPU, a GPU with vertex and pixel shaders (with very old-looking pipeline), and a FPU. These began from only a basic library of components (registers, shift registers, etc) and had well-developed test harnesses.
Sadly, our CPU didn't get finished in the ten weeks we had (exception handling working in simulation but not on board, some unimplemented operations like multiply-step, and a really lame branch prediction unit that predicted not taken). But we plan on continuing. ^_^
I believe it's slower because RPM has finer-grained package management (which is probably useless to most people). Someone can correct me on this, but I think RPM's dependencies are handled by file name, rather than by package name. The dependency checks tend to take longer, consequently.
On a modern system, the difference seems hardly noticeable now (in YaST, at least).
Well, we'll cut a long argument to nowhere short and say that if you believe in physicalism, it's possible.
I'm a proponent of dualism, as it makes more sense to me for there to be some separate receptor for qualia. You'd have to recreate that nonphysical entity to make the computer human in the dualist mode; it wouldn't be enough to simply emulate the behaviors.
The way I see it, the fundamental difference between man and machine is the ability to experience qualia (i.e. the properties of the sensory experiences). You don't have the full experience if you arbitrarily measure the various physical quantities; humans are able to feel expressions of them.
Unfortunately, that isn't true in my case (Radeon HD 3850). 8.6 led to the death of my motherboard--it ran some hardware autodetection program and I guess the pre-selected options were incorrect for my case (northbridge and ide options were selected).
After rebooting, Windblows blue screened shortly after entering the desktop. It kept doing that (and sometimes even rebooted itself without a BSOD), so I tried to install an older driver in safe mode. After the installation failed (the hardware detection portion couldn't run in safe mode, apparently), I tried to install the older driver before it blue screened. Unfortunately, in the middle of installation, it rebooted itself, and the motherboard died. No video, no POST beeps, no power to the southbridge devices.
Some have claimed the BSODs stop when they get rid of the IDE and northbridge options, so I was perhaps too careless. But it's ridiculous that my motherboard failed because of a software driver. I hate ATI's drivers.
Sometimes the CD-ROMs are useful, actually. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach has a CD-ROM with a bunch of appendices that have good information, and the professors claimed this actually reduced the cost of the book--how much does it cost to press a CD for each book anyway? Pennies for each?
They'll shape traffic to prefer the comcast
servers and peers to those same peers or any others talking to non-comcast servers.
This is actually what you want, to some degree, and it's already been happening for quite some time. For example, Akamai has been placing servers between or within network boundaries in order to bring the content closer to you. It's all to speed things up.
Problem is... if everyone went the Mac route, you'd have a monopsony of sorts and the computer hardware industry would falter (and Apple would eventually feel the pain too).
Though, that might happen anyway... There seems to be some real fear that if we don't figure out how to make parallel architectures go fast, the industry will just get sales for replacements. There is little instruction-level parallelism left to exploit and power/heat issues are making it difficult to just throw transistors at a problem. Hopefully the guys at ParLab (and me too, if I can help, haha) can figure things out.
Too bad it won't fix the awful camera angle used to broadcast football. There's so much more to football than the guy with the ball or the line of scrimmage.
In addition to sports, computer animation should look better in a higher resolution. Beyond those two, though, I don't think there's much purpose in HD.
as if everyone who bought a 360 bought it for the HD-DVD capabilities I know I didn't. I bought the 360 for the exclusive RPGs and better price. The draw of Final Fantasy seemed to leave with Sakaguchi-san for me (dunno why, exactly; was he really that important to the series? But the feel of it has changed for the worse, I think.). On the other hand, Lost Odyssey has been awesome so far (though it has some bugs, so save often, lol), and I'm looking forward to Fable 2.
No, I didn't, but you'd figure that you could at least get DSL in Berkeley too (except it would be AT&T...). As a student, I don't have a lot of affordable housing options, so having a lot of broadband options is really secondary to a lot of other, more important factors.
I'm not complaining, though. As far as I can tell, none of my bittorrent traffic is being throttled (though I impose a restriction on the upload rate myself--a modest 35 KiB/s--, else the link gets saturated and games start seeing over half a second of latency). Perhaps it helps that we're paying for their highest consumer tier, but that wouldn't really make sense.
If you offer me music without DRM at a fair price, I will pay the price and get the music legally.
You might want to try emusic, then; they sell mp3s. Though the largest labels won't be present, they do have a fairly large library and songs cost at most about 0.33 USD. The caveat is that it's sort of a subscription, where you get 30 songs per month at 9.99 USD. Your songs also don't roll over, so you'd have to download all of them that month. To stop the $10 payment each month, you just cancel, and you still have your mp3s.
Their promotion is getting kind of crazy, though; now they add 50 free songs to your first month (it used to be 25). What is that... like 12 or 13 cents per song? Does that sound like a fair price?;-)
I'd just like to point out that your examples of bad "socialist" governments have little relevance. The people in those examples have no power over who makes up the government. The US uses a relatively legit ballot to determine who takes office in many cases (for those with the greatest power), so it is fallacious to predict the US's performance with some socialist policies based on those examples.
After the first play through, Prophecies is extremely boring up until about Ascension. ANet kind of fixed that with Factions, where the leveling and skill acquisition proceeded at a blistering pace. On the solo side, the introduction of heroes in Nightfall made starting characters with new professions and developing their skills exceedingly important, since heroes only had unlocked skills available to them. You could invest a lot of time into the ten classes, just trying out different professions. And for multiplayer PvE, roleplay?;-)
They still don't add more than seasonal quests to the existing PvE content, but if you went through all of what was offered, I don't know what to say... you're too hardcore; take some breaks, haha. I've managed to put over 300 hours into the game (okay, a not insignificant portion was idling and chatting) over 7 characters. Each of the professions has different caveats that make them interesting, I think, and I find trying out new characters and giving each of them an identity for roleplaying quite fun.
There's plenty to do if you like to explore. If you're just looking for new dungeons, it was $50 (or less) and you didn't have to pay a monthly fee; consider it like an offline RPG with some multiplayer added in for kicks.
Well the hope would be that there is some kind of competition in your area. Other firms would try to grab those lower bandwidth users with a lower price, since they can give up some marginal profit for an expanse of the total. Now if only we had competition...
There's also much less incentive to cheat in Guild Wars. Achieving the maximum armor level or weapon damage range takes no time at all. The slightly random values of the inscriptions and such don't have a large enough range to make it important that you have the maximum for those. The portion that takes a lot of effort is creating your character's appearance, which is not important, to say the least. Also, guild halls and the improvements that go with them do, but aside from the price of the celestial sigil, it doesn't change much.
But then... even with all of that, there are still people that sit in faction battles... What can you do besides report them?
I disagree about WoW being the better game. Certainly GW would be more exciting with persistent worlds and world pvp (GW isn't really an MMORPG per se), it has a much more interesting approach to combat. There's actually a touch of thought involved on the player's part...;-)
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Hm, I disagree. Science does not start from evidence. It begins from the irrational, from the formation of the models and language used to describe an observer's sensations. Evidence is used only in a model's falsification, made possible by science's crucial premise--the existence of a predictive, deterministic model. That is a belief, by the way, not something that can be proven (neglecting omniscience).
So it's not that she's discarding evidence or reason. She just may not share the same basic beliefs. Neither side is provably correct; moreover, that foundation confines both your knowledge and hers.
That said, without some of us believing in predictability, I wouldn't have a job! ;-)
Not all sites are like that, though. For example, HardOCP attempts to find the highest settings a card can handle while still achieving some minimum average frame rate. You still can't take the numbers as indicators for your particular system, though, unless all of your other components have comparable performance to their test rig.
Haha, I'm sounding like an asshole, I think. I just mean to say that the class really isn't so advanced that it should be graduate-level (with the assumption that graduates should have already seen Verilog and done hardware design--at Berkeley, we have several undergrad classes with FPGA design projects).
I'd post links to what we've done, but it's not finished yet. It's BSD-licensed but hiding in a repository that doesn't (yet) give access to the public.
Hm... I was probably a little confusing. CS 150 is done over 10 weeks or so with teams of 2 students, but the projects are probably larger. Slapping a NIOS core on an FPGA and having it run C code is hardly much of a hardware project. I will give them credit for having something to show in 4 weeks, but I'd expect graduate students wouldn't have any trouble with that unless this were their first hardware project. (Students always underestimate the integration step)
As far as being busy with other crap, that's the same for every student.
Well, while you go on in fear, I'm going to continue using what I've found to be the most polished distribution for KDE4 users (out of Fedora, openSUSE, Kubuntu, and Debian). Fedora annoyingly included a pre-release version of xorg that didn't have driver support from nvidia or amd. I have no idea what's up with Kubuntu; the maintainers need to work a little harder at making it stable and fast. Debian is just missing some of the nicer GUI tools for system administration.
If you've got a better distribution to try, I'd love to hear it. (I'm really happy we have KVM ^_^)
Graduate-level? Why? I would congratulate the students on nice projects if this were their first hardware course, but they seem too simple for graduate students.
At Cal, we have an undergraduate course with a project of similar complexity for a given timeframe (CS 150). The only reason for the length is to become acclimated to FPGA design.
Once you get past the basics, you can do interesting projects. This semester, six undergraduates (including myself) worked on some much larger projects--a SPARC CPU, a GPU with vertex and pixel shaders (with very old-looking pipeline), and a FPU. These began from only a basic library of components (registers, shift registers, etc) and had well-developed test harnesses.
Sadly, our CPU didn't get finished in the ten weeks we had (exception handling working in simulation but not on board, some unimplemented operations like multiply-step, and a really lame branch prediction unit that predicted not taken). But we plan on continuing. ^_^
I believe it's slower because RPM has finer-grained package management (which is probably useless to most people). Someone can correct me on this, but I think RPM's dependencies are handled by file name, rather than by package name. The dependency checks tend to take longer, consequently.
On a modern system, the difference seems hardly noticeable now (in YaST, at least).
Well, we'll cut a long argument to nowhere short and say that if you believe in physicalism, it's possible.
I'm a proponent of dualism, as it makes more sense to me for there to be some separate receptor for qualia. You'd have to recreate that nonphysical entity to make the computer human in the dualist mode; it wouldn't be enough to simply emulate the behaviors.
Or at least I can... for all I know, you all could be zombies! ;-)
But then humans are so much more than a computer.
The way I see it, the fundamental difference between man and machine is the ability to experience qualia (i.e. the properties of the sensory experiences). You don't have the full experience if you arbitrarily measure the various physical quantities; humans are able to feel expressions of them.
Well, as long as you aren't posting about bunnies...
Unfortunately, that isn't true in my case (Radeon HD 3850). 8.6 led to the death of my motherboard--it ran some hardware autodetection program and I guess the pre-selected options were incorrect for my case (northbridge and ide options were selected).
After rebooting, Windblows blue screened shortly after entering the desktop. It kept doing that (and sometimes even rebooted itself without a BSOD), so I tried to install an older driver in safe mode. After the installation failed (the hardware detection portion couldn't run in safe mode, apparently), I tried to install the older driver before it blue screened. Unfortunately, in the middle of installation, it rebooted itself, and the motherboard died. No video, no POST beeps, no power to the southbridge devices.
Some have claimed the BSODs stop when they get rid of the IDE and northbridge options, so I was perhaps too careless. But it's ridiculous that my motherboard failed because of a software driver. I hate ATI's drivers.
That's more of an x86 problem, though, isn't it? Don't ASIDs help that in some other architectures?
Sometimes the CD-ROMs are useful, actually. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach has a CD-ROM with a bunch of appendices that have good information, and the professors claimed this actually reduced the cost of the book--how much does it cost to press a CD for each book anyway? Pennies for each?
This is actually what you want, to some degree, and it's already been happening for quite some time. For example, Akamai has been placing servers between or within network boundaries in order to bring the content closer to you. It's all to speed things up.
Problem is... if everyone went the Mac route, you'd have a monopsony of sorts and the computer hardware industry would falter (and Apple would eventually feel the pain too).
Though, that might happen anyway... There seems to be some real fear that if we don't figure out how to make parallel architectures go fast, the industry will just get sales for replacements. There is little instruction-level parallelism left to exploit and power/heat issues are making it difficult to just throw transistors at a problem. Hopefully the guys at ParLab (and me too, if I can help, haha) can figure things out.
In addition to sports, computer animation should look better in a higher resolution. Beyond those two, though, I don't think there's much purpose in HD.
I'm not complaining, though. As far as I can tell, none of my bittorrent traffic is being throttled (though I impose a restriction on the upload rate myself--a modest 35 KiB/s--, else the link gets saturated and games start seeing over half a second of latency). Perhaps it helps that we're paying for their highest consumer tier, but that wouldn't really make sense.
I'd like to know where this "competition" is. Comcast is the only broadband provider for my residence.
You might want to try emusic, then; they sell mp3s. Though the largest labels won't be present, they do have a fairly large library and songs cost at most about 0.33 USD. The caveat is that it's sort of a subscription, where you get 30 songs per month at 9.99 USD. Your songs also don't roll over, so you'd have to download all of them that month. To stop the $10 payment each month, you just cancel, and you still have your mp3s.
Their promotion is getting kind of crazy, though; now they add 50 free songs to your first month (it used to be 25). What is that... like 12 or 13 cents per song? Does that sound like a fair price? ;-)
I'd just like to point out that your examples of bad "socialist" governments have little relevance. The people in those examples have no power over who makes up the government. The US uses a relatively legit ballot to determine who takes office in many cases (for those with the greatest power), so it is fallacious to predict the US's performance with some socialist policies based on those examples.
They still don't add more than seasonal quests to the existing PvE content, but if you went through all of what was offered, I don't know what to say... you're too hardcore; take some breaks, haha. I've managed to put over 300 hours into the game (okay, a not insignificant portion was idling and chatting) over 7 characters. Each of the professions has different caveats that make them interesting, I think, and I find trying out new characters and giving each of them an identity for roleplaying quite fun.
There's plenty to do if you like to explore. If you're just looking for new dungeons, it was $50 (or less) and you didn't have to pay a monthly fee; consider it like an offline RPG with some multiplayer added in for kicks.
Well the hope would be that there is some kind of competition in your area. Other firms would try to grab those lower bandwidth users with a lower price, since they can give up some marginal profit for an expanse of the total. Now if only we had competition...
But then... even with all of that, there are still people that sit in faction battles... What can you do besides report them?
I disagree about WoW being the better game. Certainly GW would be more exciting with persistent worlds and world pvp (GW isn't really an MMORPG per se), it has a much more interesting approach to combat. There's actually a touch of thought involved on the player's part... ;-)