Only on Slashdot can a post that confuses power (watt) and energy (watt-hour) be modded +3 Interesting.
Actually, "Only on slashdot will some people actually notice that the poster used the wrong units" might be more like it. Whether or not the moderators notice, on slashdot you know *someone* will alert you to your mistakes, whether it's having the wrong units, wrong spelling, or wrong point of view.
Whether or not Dell wants to keep selling XP is a choice for Dell. They
should be the party in control here. Beyond the ability to get XP from
Microsoft, Microsoft shouldn't have any say in the matter.
IIRC, the courts have upheld MS's right to make these kinds of deals before. Besides, why shouldn't people pay more for XP than Vista? Apparently, XP is the better product.
I don't personally think this is genuinely what they do, but if it was it would be reprehensible.
Since when is maximizing profits "reprehensible" behavior for a company? I don't think you can even call it dishonest just because *you* think a product should be labeled a "tech demo" rather than a "game".
I remember discussions in the UK before that on how Japan benefited commercially from not having a significant military, meaning that not only did they not have to pay for it out of taxes, but engineers who might be making missiles could work on things like better cars.
That's true but it's a lopsided picture. Japan was a big military power until WW2. Since their defeat, their new constitution only allows them a "self defense force". Japan may have benefited from this economically, but they are weak militarily. Many Japanese want a stronger military, especially since N. Korea has been test launching missiles through their airspace.
I'm not saying this isn't interesting or that the estimates are completely worthless, but we find some fossilized snake vertebrae, make an educated guess as to what part of the the snake they came from, extrapolate based on modern snake proportions the size and weight of the entire snake, then estimate the temperature of this snake's original environment based on that size. I'm no biologist, so maybe it's more accurate than it sounds, but it seems there is a pretty significant margin of error at each step, not to mention a lot of assumptions.
I mean the TFA that in essence claims that because an expert may be wrong, any probability the expert assigns to a risk can be ignored and inflated by as much you feel like it. Talk about bias.
Bias? Hype, maybe. Actually, this does make some sense, IMO. Say I was offering to shoot an apple off the top of your head and I told you I'd calculated there was only a 1 in 1 million chance of the bullet hitting you instead. Now if you knew (somehow) that there was a 1 in 10 chance I'd gotten the calculation wrong, you're going to look at it as more of a 1 in 10 chance of getting hit... or at least way more than one in 1 million.
I think you misread the article. They claim Windows 7 is going to be the first Windows version that is faster than it's predecessor (in this case Vista) on the same hardware.
Okay, *THAT* has to be one of the funniest things I ever read on slashdot! We celebrate nerdishness. You'll probably be modded "informative" if anything.
Does it generate enough energy to power itself and yield a surplus?
TFA says once it has been running for about 2 hours, it uses 7% of the generated fuel to power itself. It also talks about selling surplus power back to the utility.
So what I want to know is, what was it about human beings that caused us to develop the capacity to drive cars, build computers and walk on the moon?
Maybe we were created to be creative. Maybe that's part of being "made in God's image". I mean, even if you take away tools and anything with practical survival benefits - what drives humans to express themselves through words and art and music and dance? Sure, even I could come up with theories that reduce all of that to "survival of the fittest", but I don't see the need.
Wouldn't it actually be using MORE electrons to display all those nice glowy white spaces?
I think you mean photons, unless you're talking about a CRT. CRT's don't "use" electrons, they briefly "free" them from the restrictions of metal into a spacious vaccum, where they dance and rejoice until they smash into a phosphor at the other end of the tube.
TFA shows a "tree" made of disk platters -- all shiny silver, no green. What's with the generic green xmas tree pic in the summary? Is that one of those "category" images?
I guess you didn't bother to even read the summary, because you seem to have missed the 2nd sentence:
"On the chopping block is $700 million in school aid and $3.5 billion in health care subsidies."
So over 4 billion in spending cuts, in just 2 areas, and probably several others too.
FTA:
Paterson's 2009-10 budget proposal represents only a 1% increase in total spending from this year's budget - the smallest increase in a dozen years. It also calls for:
A 3.3%, or $698 million, reduction in school aid.
$3.5 billion in health care savings, including reductions in payments to hospitals and nursing homes.
Video slot machines at Belmont Park, more multistate lottery games and expanded hours for the state's Quick Draw lottery game.
Layoffs for 521 state workers and the elimination of seven state agencies.
So this isn't an overall spending decrease, but a spending "deceleration". Put another way, it's not a step in the right direction, but it's a smaller step in the wrong direction than usual.
No GA "figures out what direction" to move algorithmically, and I don't believe I ever suggested that.
I was trying to describe gradient descent. Basically, I was saying that finding the gradient in this case sounds pretty difficult, so this alleged "GA" algorithm sounded much easier to implement. I apologize for my poor description.
The Mona Lisa project is not using randomness to imitate a biological process. Without a population, and at least the reproductive crossover function, it's barely more than a random-walk hill climbing algorithm.
Thanks for the explanation. Hmmm, that makes me want to try this project with the process you describe. I'm guessing it would converge a lot faster (fewer generations anyway). I can see now what you meant by "climbing more than one hill at a time". With the algorithm described in the article, that didn't make sense, but with a population greater than 1 it does.
By mimicking biological evolution, it adds the ability to effectively climb several 'hills' simultaneously, as well as explore new 'hills'. This increases the probability that one of these hills has the highest 'peak'. Without that randomness, the population would never leave the hills they are on, and would almost certainly miss an optimal solution if it existed on another hill.
I never studied GA, so I may be off here, but I'm not sure that's accurate. The algorithm described for this Mona Lisa project sounds like it would be just as likely to find a local min (or max in hill climbing terms) as a gradient descent algorithm (it would just take longer to get there!). In both cases, I think the likelihood of hitting a local min would depend more on the amount you change your parameters with each iteration.
A previous post sounds more to the point... it's easier to see how different two images are than to figure out what "direction" to move each vertex to optimally improve the match at each iteration.
A little googling found that: a cell phone requires something on the order of 1W (while in use). Speaking in a normal voice produces on the order of 0.00001W of sound energy. I don't think cell phone power requirements could ever get that low (unless the cell towers were much closer together). Interesting idea, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Only on Slashdot can a post that confuses power (watt) and energy (watt-hour) be modded +3 Interesting.
Actually, "Only on slashdot will some people actually notice that the poster used the wrong units" might be more like it. Whether or not the moderators notice, on slashdot you know *someone* will alert you to your mistakes, whether it's having the wrong units, wrong spelling, or wrong point of view.
Whether or not Dell wants to keep selling XP is a choice for Dell. They should be the party in control here. Beyond the ability to get XP from Microsoft, Microsoft shouldn't have any say in the matter.
IIRC, the courts have upheld MS's right to make these kinds of deals before. Besides, why shouldn't people pay more for XP than Vista? Apparently, XP is the better product.
Couldn't that just as easily mean that your children inherited a fear of bugs that doesn't "kick in" until age 5?
I don't personally think this is genuinely what they do, but if it was it would be reprehensible.
Since when is maximizing profits "reprehensible" behavior for a company? I don't think you can even call it dishonest just because *you* think a product should be labeled a "tech demo" rather than a "game".
I remember discussions in the UK before that on how Japan benefited commercially from not having a significant military, meaning that not only did they not have to pay for it out of taxes, but engineers who might be making missiles could work on things like better cars.
That's true but it's a lopsided picture. Japan was a big military power until WW2. Since their defeat, their new constitution only allows them a "self defense force". Japan may have benefited from this economically, but they are weak militarily. Many Japanese want a stronger military, especially since N. Korea has been test launching missiles through their airspace.
I'm not saying this isn't interesting or that the estimates are completely worthless, but we find some fossilized snake vertebrae, make an educated guess as to what part of the the snake they came from, extrapolate based on modern snake proportions the size and weight of the entire snake, then estimate the temperature of this snake's original environment based on that size. I'm no biologist, so maybe it's more accurate than it sounds, but it seems there is a pretty significant margin of error at each step, not to mention a lot of assumptions.
It's interesting that most media outlets are ignoring this.
Yeah, you'd think the "specifically targeting journalists" part would garner some media attention.
I mean the TFA that in essence claims that because an expert may be wrong, any probability the expert assigns to a risk can be ignored and inflated by as much you feel like it. Talk about bias.
Bias? Hype, maybe. Actually, this does make some sense, IMO. Say I was offering to shoot an apple off the top of your head and I told you I'd calculated there was only a 1 in 1 million chance of the bullet hitting you instead. Now if you knew (somehow) that there was a 1 in 10 chance I'd gotten the calculation wrong, you're going to look at it as more of a 1 in 10 chance of getting hit ... or at least way more than one in 1 million.
Electricity can be made from CSP Thermal Solar and Wind and if those run out the whole planet is dead anyways.
So what you're saying is that if we use too much solar or wind power, we're all dead. There's just no good long term solution, is there?
"Vista makes your computer run faster?"
I think you misread the article. They claim Windows 7 is going to be the first Windows version that is faster than it's predecessor (in this case Vista) on the same hardware.
I feel a little nerdish for doing this, but....
Okay, *THAT* has to be one of the funniest things I ever read on slashdot! We celebrate nerdishness. You'll probably be modded "informative" if anything.
Does it generate enough energy to power itself and yield a surplus?
TFA says once it has been running for about 2 hours, it uses 7% of the generated fuel to power itself. It also talks about selling surplus power back to the utility.
Sounds like a bunch of B.S.
"skunkopotamus"
So what I want to know is, what was it about human beings that caused us to develop the capacity to drive cars, build computers and walk on the moon?
Maybe we were created to be creative. Maybe that's part of being "made in God's image". I mean, even if you take away tools and anything with practical survival benefits - what drives humans to express themselves through words and art and music and dance? Sure, even I could come up with theories that reduce all of that to "survival of the fittest", but I don't see the need.
Wouldn't it actually be using MORE electrons to display all those nice glowy white spaces?
I think you mean photons, unless you're talking about a CRT. CRT's don't "use" electrons, they briefly "free" them from the restrictions of metal into a spacious vaccum, where they dance and rejoice until they smash into a phosphor at the other end of the tube.
TFA shows a "tree" made of disk platters -- all shiny silver, no green. What's with the generic green xmas tree pic in the summary? Is that one of those "category" images?
I guess you didn't bother to even read the summary, because you seem to have missed the 2nd sentence: "On the chopping block is $700 million in school aid and $3.5 billion in health care subsidies." So over 4 billion in spending cuts, in just 2 areas, and probably several others too.
FTA:
Paterson's 2009-10 budget proposal represents only a 1% increase in total spending from this year's budget - the smallest increase in a dozen years. It also calls for:
So this isn't an overall spending decrease, but a spending "deceleration". Put another way, it's not a step in the right direction, but it's a smaller step in the wrong direction than usual.
No GA "figures out what direction" to move algorithmically, and I don't believe I ever suggested that.
I was trying to describe gradient descent. Basically, I was saying that finding the gradient in this case sounds pretty difficult, so this alleged "GA" algorithm sounded much easier to implement. I apologize for my poor description.
The Mona Lisa project is not using randomness to imitate a biological process. Without a population, and at least the reproductive crossover function, it's barely more than a random-walk hill climbing algorithm.
Thanks for the explanation. Hmmm, that makes me want to try this project with the process you describe. I'm guessing it would converge a lot faster (fewer generations anyway). I can see now what you meant by "climbing more than one hill at a time". With the algorithm described in the article, that didn't make sense, but with a population greater than 1 it does.
By mimicking biological evolution, it adds the ability to effectively climb several 'hills' simultaneously, as well as explore new 'hills'. This increases the probability that one of these hills has the highest 'peak'. Without that randomness, the population would never leave the hills they are on, and would almost certainly miss an optimal solution if it existed on another hill.
I never studied GA, so I may be off here, but I'm not sure that's accurate. The algorithm described for this Mona Lisa project sounds like it would be just as likely to find a local min (or max in hill climbing terms) as a gradient descent algorithm (it would just take longer to get there!). In both cases, I think the likelihood of hitting a local min would depend more on the amount you change your parameters with each iteration.
A previous post sounds more to the point ... it's easier to see how different two images are than to figure out what "direction" to move each vertex to optimally improve the match at each iteration.
Vi is divine. Emacs is the work of man.
vivivi is the editor of the beast.
we have kids in schools today that cannot read...what good will a computer do them?
omgwtf? ru srius?
On a planet of women, what is a man needed for? Reproduction that is it.
This is probably more well known in general society than it is in this forum, but most women actually do enjoy sex with men.
A little googling found that: a cell phone requires something on the order of 1W (while in use). Speaking in a normal voice produces on the order of 0.00001W of sound energy. I don't think cell phone power requirements could ever get that low (unless the cell towers were much closer together). Interesting idea, though.