Re:For me, this story crossed a line. ATI excellen
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Is AMD Dead Yet?
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Yeah I'm always watching the front page of slashdot waiting for it to tell me what to buy and what to sell. Actually that might work...stock market is group think, slashdot is group think.
Yeah, but slashdot is tech group think, which is often very different from business group think. Business group think probably has greater effect on the market. Of course, once you know what the group think is, it's too late because the stock price will have already moved.
That's an apples to orange groves comparison if I ever heard one. NASA isn't building a fleet of 100s of space shuttles and operating them in war zones. I'm not even sure you can say that what NASA is doing is "more sophisticated". Fighter jets have many design considerations that NASA's rockets don't - like avoiding enemy bullets and missiles. I'm not arguing that the air force isn't inefficient, I'm just saying the NASA's relatively small budget is not proof of that inefficiency. The organizations are just too different to compare on total budget alone.
What I meant was that your post should have been a reply to the original parody, which was a reference that I didn't get either.
LOL. I get it now - yes, I did reply to the wrong post. The AC rewrote the comment as if it were about the original macintosh computer - is that what you meant by the reference you didn't get?
...the problem can be summed up in one word: TORQUE.
For my old Atari 1200 I had a baseless tilt-sensitive joystick. It basically solved the torque problem. IIRC, it worked with mercury switches. It was great for the simpler games.
Yeah, redshift, but even your linked article casts doubt on it's accuracy:
The Hubble law's linear relationship between distance and redshift assumes that the rate of expansion of the universe is constant. However, when the universe was much younger, the expansion rate, and thus the Hubble "constant", was larger than it is today. For more distant galaxies, then, whose light has been travelling to us for much longer times, the approximation of constant expansion rate fails, and the Hubble law becomes a non-linear integral relationship and dependent on the history of the expansion rate since the emission of the light from the galaxy in question. Observations of the redshift-distance relationship can be used, then, to determine the expansion history of the universe and thus the matter and energy content.
While it was long believed that the expansion rate has been continuously decreasing since the big-bang, recent observations of the redshift-distance relationship using Type Ia supernovae have suggested that in comparatively recent times the expansion rate of the universe has begun to accelerate.
Maybe we need a new law -- the farther away an object is, the more assumptions we have to make to pretend we know anything about it. Another thing I always wondered about redshift - what if the object in question is itself moving at a high speed unrelated to the apparently uniform "expansion" we see with other objects? Wouldn't that affect the amount of red shift and throw off the distance estimate?
Nothing in the operating system is ground breaking, every aspect of it has been done in other computers already, its more about the combination of user interface elements and design that sets it apart I guess.
I disagree. The "massively online single-player" aspect is pretty new (AFAIK), but the "parameterized models" and "procedural animations" are subtly revolutionary. I mean they've DRASTICALLY streamlined the process of creating a 3d model for a game. Do you think the game studios run something as simple as the spore interface to create a 3d model and all of it's animations?
Imagine how other games could benefit from this approach: Imagine, say, a zombie game where instead of randomly spawning zombies from a set of 10 or 20 (or even 100) models, you have a nearly infinite variety of zombies generated from randomly chosen inputs for height, weight, hair, wounds, clothing, state of decay, etc. Now suppose the animations are not all the same, but are randomly determined by the zombie's height, weight, and number of functional limbs. Or imagine characters whose walk or climb animations are based on the actual geometry of the world, so they don't "jump" with every step up an incline or "moonwalk" trying to go through a wall. The game studios have done a very good job of making fixed animations and fixed characters look good, but there is a lot of room for improvement (especially since a high-end CPU is usually twiddling it's thumbs in even newer games while the GPU does all the work).
Okay, so congress TURNED DOWN an amendment to a law that would REMOVE RETROACTIVE IMMUNITY for telcos who did something (at the government's request) that would be legal under this law, but was ARGUABLY ILLEGAL under current law. Okay, so they won't not not prosecute the telcos for not not wiretapping domestic calls with no warrant. There, now it's worded more like a ballot initiative.
I like the idea of the other amendment they mentioned - holding the government responsible instead of the companies. I mean, you're in a pretty bad spot when you have to choose between obeying the executive branch and obeying the legislative branch of government. It may even be a gray area legally - can't the president override some things by executive order?
An example or two ...
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Ethics In IT
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I once had a job as a programmer for the company's marketing department. There were layoffs going on and most people were in full CYA mode most of the time. I knew that several people who interfaced with our customers would routinely lie to them. One time I found a bug in the software that I had created and I was told I'd have to be on the call to explain to our customers what happened. My coworkers were waiting to see how I'd "spin" this and how the customers would react. In response to "how did this happen?", I said something like "Well, It was my code and my fault for missing a test scenario. All I can say is, I apologize, and I'm doing my best to correct it as soon as possible. The fix should be released in time for the next run." After a short (stunned) silence, the customers actually thanked me for my honesty and consoled me saying, "well, everyone makes mistakes" and that sort of thing. I think they were just so surprised at getting an honest answer that they forgot to be angry! In my experience, honesty really is the best policy.
Answer: Because the world's western population is growing at an alarming rate - think "exponent". India and China (a third of the world's population between them) are westernising at an incredible speed - China adds a new city every month or so, and India's population growth is explosive.
That's not what it looks like on this map. Also, "exponential" doesn't necessarily equal "alarming". A country could have a NEGATIVE exponential growth rate.
Most universities provide internet access without charging the students anything additional.
I don't know if it's an actual itemized charge like it was when I was in school (it's been a while - think "gopher"), but I'm sure the students' tuition is paying for the campus network and internet access.
And as the discussion proves, students are cheap and if something is free they will take it over something that isn't.
Are you suggesting that the rest of us prefer to pass up free stuff?
The embryos then began to develop normally, but were destroyed within six days.
Okay, so apparently as part of an experiment, just to see if it could be done, they fertilized human eggs, let the embryos develop for a few days, then killed them. Doesn't that bother ANYONE? Did I read that wrong? It sounds like they're creating people for experiments just to kill them! Yeah, I know a lot of you don't believe an embryo is a person, but I'm mainly posting for those who share my view but might have missed that aspect of the story.
How many 'strangers online' did kids meet that were their own age?
They probably left that out of the study because they consider it irrelevant, as do I. Even if 99% of such meetings are harmless, it's NOT a good idea for a child to try to hook up with someone they've only known online. Children are told not to talk to strangers for the same reason. I'm sure most strangers are perfectly safe to talk to, but there is a risk, and children in general aren't very good at risk assessment.
We all know that colorblind people can see colors correctly underwater while those who have correct vision cannot.
I've never heard that before. My understanding is that colorblindness is due to an absence or shortage of color receptor cells in the eye. I don't see how that could give someone better vision underwater.
OTOH, I have heard that color blind people are better at spotting camouflaged objects. I presume that's because they see things DIFFERENTLY than the non-colorblind person who created the camouflage.
Also speed doesn't translate into distance in this simplistic way either: if it did humans would be almost able to jump the distance (max speed = 26.25mph) which is close as damm it to the 26.7mph required.
Actually, the (human) long jump record is 7.52m, so we almost can jump that far (well, same ballpark, anyway). I guess it depends on how well you can shift that forward momentum into upward momentum.
That is a good point about the center of gravity. It may have already been a few feet in the air AND a few feet past the edge when it left the ground. Likewise, it may not have quite needed to get it's center of gravity on a trajectory that would clear the wall, as long as it got it's front paws on the opposite side enough to pull itself the rest of the way over.
... just possible, that the reason we're behind in broadband is because there isn't enough demand? Sure, in all those other countries the government stepped in and built something and now we're "behind". So what? I love a fast internet connection as much as the next guy, but I'm not ready to have the government make YOU help pay (via taxes) for the build out to my rural neighborhood. Nor am I ready to help pay for the build out to the old farmer down the road who doesn't even have a computer. People who want government to step in where business isn't "getting the job done" should ask themselves first WHY business isn't getting the job done. If you see fast internet as a NEED, then I guess you have a case, but I don't see it that way. Sounds like people are upset that we're not "keeping up with the Joneses".
I've never used Vista (maybe for 5 min at my parent's house), so I don't have my own opinion, but can we just admit that apparently SOME people have problems with it? I mean, sure some are probably exaggerating, and some are probably having driver issues (which I don't see any reason to ignore, actually), but are you really ready to claim that ALL the complaints are groundless just because YOU didn't have a problem? And what is a problem to one person may not be a problem to others. Someone could at least link some data to make their case: Here are some tests of XP vs Vista on the same hardware.
My invention, "An Actual Torch" can set things on fire in even less time. It also has a much more disperse beam so it illuminates a wide area. The only drawback is it has a much shorter range. But then again on the plus side, it can't be accidentally used to destroy airplanes.
In a strange recursive way, this scheme is not illegal here (NL) because the advice in the kit is sound and delivers exactly what was promised in the ad, namely a legal way to make money working from home.
Interesting. In the U.S., I'm pretty sure that would be considered a "pyramid scheme" and therefore illegal. The people who start it may make a lot of money, but once there's no one left to recruit, a bunch of people just lose their starter kit money. The idea of it NOT being illegal is interesting. It raises the question of how much should a government do to protect it's citizens from their own foolishness.
You cant seriously suggest that evil done in name of atheism compares to that done for whatever ethereal being was in vogue at the time?
Well, yes, I think I can. Once you devalue the victim, the result is the same. It doesn't matter whether you devalue them because they are "infidels" or because you think they're "holding back" society. Given that most of the world has believed some kind of religion for most of history, in sheer numbers I'm sure there's been more evil done in the name of religion than atheism. Probably both numbers are dwarfed by the amount of evil done for purely selfish motives, though (just watch the news!).
Thanks for an unusually intelligent (for a religious person) reply BTW.
LOL... I'll take that as a compliment. Actually, I get that a lot. I think it's because I try really hard to see things from the other side, and not get too emotional about it. A mentor once told me, "God doesn't need you to defend him." I think a lot of people get worked up when you criticize something dear to them, and getting worked up really limits your ability to sound intelligent.
If you follow the trends happening in CPUs, including this one, faster CPUs aren't the big issue. The real issue is the bus. The bus is slow. The more you put on the other side of it, the better. A CPU like this new VIA CPU might be slow, but if you had sufficient memory integrated right on the CPU die, it would blow the pants off your latest 4+GHz Core 2 Duo.
NOT true! Yes, on-die cache is way faster than main memory, but for most applications, you're hitting the cache most of the time. I can't find any articles right now with numbers, but I know from looking at tests on the effect of cache size on performance that at some point you hit rapidly diminishing returns for cache size increases.
It's pretty analogous to main memory vs disk latency. If you don't have enough main memory, your system bogs down swapping to disk, but if you have enough memory that that doesn't happen, increasing the amount of memory beyond that won't make much of a difference.
I would say that parallelization is the next big thing(tm) in improving CPU performance. Clock speed seems to have hit a wall.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but slashdot is tech group think, which is often very different from business group think. Business group think probably has greater effect on the market. Of course, once you know what the group think is, it's too late because the stock price will have already moved.
... Yet, NASA receives a mere $16.2B per yearThat's an apples to orange groves comparison if I ever heard one. NASA isn't building a fleet of 100s of space shuttles and operating them in war zones. I'm not even sure you can say that what NASA is doing is "more sophisticated". Fighter jets have many design considerations that NASA's rockets don't - like avoiding enemy bullets and missiles. I'm not arguing that the air force isn't inefficient, I'm just saying the NASA's relatively small budget is not proof of that inefficiency. The organizations are just too different to compare on total budget alone.
LOL. I get it now - yes, I did reply to the wrong post. The AC rewrote the comment as if it were about the original macintosh computer - is that what you meant by the reference you didn't get?
I thought I had something interesting to contribute to the thread (and apparently at least one moderator agreed).
...the problem can be summed up in one word: TORQUE.For my old Atari 1200 I had a baseless tilt-sensitive joystick. It basically solved the torque problem. IIRC, it worked with mercury switches. It was great for the simpler games.
The Hubble law's linear relationship between distance and redshift assumes that the rate of expansion of the universe is constant. However, when the universe was much younger, the expansion rate, and thus the Hubble "constant", was larger than it is today. For more distant galaxies, then, whose light has been travelling to us for much longer times, the approximation of constant expansion rate fails, and the Hubble law becomes a non-linear integral relationship and dependent on the history of the expansion rate since the emission of the light from the galaxy in question. Observations of the redshift-distance relationship can be used, then, to determine the expansion history of the universe and thus the matter and energy content.
While it was long believed that the expansion rate has been continuously decreasing since the big-bang, recent observations of the redshift-distance relationship using Type Ia supernovae have suggested that in comparatively recent times the expansion rate of the universe has begun to accelerate.
Maybe we need a new law -- the farther away an object is, the more assumptions we have to make to pretend we know anything about it. Another thing I always wondered about redshift - what if the object in question is itself moving at a high speed unrelated to the apparently uniform "expansion" we see with other objects? Wouldn't that affect the amount of red shift and throw off the distance estimate?
I disagree. The "massively online single-player" aspect is pretty new (AFAIK), but the "parameterized models" and "procedural animations" are subtly revolutionary. I mean they've DRASTICALLY streamlined the process of creating a 3d model for a game. Do you think the game studios run something as simple as the spore interface to create a 3d model and all of it's animations?
Imagine how other games could benefit from this approach: Imagine, say, a zombie game where instead of randomly spawning zombies from a set of 10 or 20 (or even 100) models, you have a nearly infinite variety of zombies generated from randomly chosen inputs for height, weight, hair, wounds, clothing, state of decay, etc. Now suppose the animations are not all the same, but are randomly determined by the zombie's height, weight, and number of functional limbs. Or imagine characters whose walk or climb animations are based on the actual geometry of the world, so they don't "jump" with every step up an incline or "moonwalk" trying to go through a wall. The game studios have done a very good job of making fixed animations and fixed characters look good, but there is a lot of room for improvement (especially since a high-end CPU is usually twiddling it's thumbs in even newer games while the GPU does all the work).
Maybe in the future, Uranus and Pluto will just be referred to by the phrase, "and the rest", like the professor and Mary Anne from Gilligan's Island.
Okay, so congress TURNED DOWN an amendment to a law that would REMOVE RETROACTIVE IMMUNITY for telcos who did something (at the government's request) that would be legal under this law, but was ARGUABLY ILLEGAL under current law. Okay, so they won't not not prosecute the telcos for not not wiretapping domestic calls with no warrant. There, now it's worded more like a ballot initiative.
I like the idea of the other amendment they mentioned - holding the government responsible instead of the companies. I mean, you're in a pretty bad spot when you have to choose between obeying the executive branch and obeying the legislative branch of government. It may even be a gray area legally - can't the president override some things by executive order?
I once had a job as a programmer for the company's marketing department. There were layoffs going on and most people were in full CYA mode most of the time. I knew that several people who interfaced with our customers would routinely lie to them. One time I found a bug in the software that I had created and I was told I'd have to be on the call to explain to our customers what happened. My coworkers were waiting to see how I'd "spin" this and how the customers would react. In response to "how did this happen?", I said something like "Well, It was my code and my fault for missing a test scenario. All I can say is, I apologize, and I'm doing my best to correct it as soon as possible. The fix should be released in time for the next run." After a short (stunned) silence, the customers actually thanked me for my honesty and consoled me saying, "well, everyone makes mistakes" and that sort of thing. I think they were just so surprised at getting an honest answer that they forgot to be angry! In my experience, honesty really is the best policy.
That's not what it looks like on this map. Also, "exponential" doesn't necessarily equal "alarming". A country could have a NEGATIVE exponential growth rate.
I don't know if it's an actual itemized charge like it was when I was in school (it's been a while - think "gopher"), but I'm sure the students' tuition is paying for the campus network and internet access.
And as the discussion proves, students are cheap and if something is free they will take it over something that isn't.Are you suggesting that the rest of us prefer to pass up free stuff?
Okay, so apparently as part of an experiment, just to see if it could be done, they fertilized human eggs, let the embryos develop for a few days, then killed them. Doesn't that bother ANYONE? Did I read that wrong? It sounds like they're creating people for experiments just to kill them! Yeah, I know a lot of you don't believe an embryo is a person, but I'm mainly posting for those who share my view but might have missed that aspect of the story.
They probably left that out of the study because they consider it irrelevant, as do I. Even if 99% of such meetings are harmless, it's NOT a good idea for a child to try to hook up with someone they've only known online. Children are told not to talk to strangers for the same reason. I'm sure most strangers are perfectly safe to talk to, but there is a risk, and children in general aren't very good at risk assessment.
I've never heard that before. My understanding is that colorblindness is due to an absence or shortage of color receptor cells in the eye. I don't see how that could give someone better vision underwater.
OTOH, I have heard that color blind people are better at spotting camouflaged objects. I presume that's because they see things DIFFERENTLY than the non-colorblind person who created the camouflage.
My bad, that's the women's record. Men's record is 8.95m (according to wikipedia)- much closer.
Actually, the (human) long jump record is 7.52m, so we almost can jump that far (well, same ballpark, anyway). I guess it depends on how well you can shift that forward momentum into upward momentum.
That is a good point about the center of gravity. It may have already been a few feet in the air AND a few feet past the edge when it left the ground. Likewise, it may not have quite needed to get it's center of gravity on a trajectory that would clear the wall, as long as it got it's front paws on the opposite side enough to pull itself the rest of the way over.
... just possible, that the reason we're behind in broadband is because there isn't enough demand? Sure, in all those other countries the government stepped in and built something and now we're "behind". So what? I love a fast internet connection as much as the next guy, but I'm not ready to have the government make YOU help pay (via taxes) for the build out to my rural neighborhood. Nor am I ready to help pay for the build out to the old farmer down the road who doesn't even have a computer. People who want government to step in where business isn't "getting the job done" should ask themselves first WHY business isn't getting the job done. If you see fast internet as a NEED, then I guess you have a case, but I don't see it that way. Sounds like people are upset that we're not "keeping up with the Joneses".
On what do you base your view that the pope "clearly" doesn't know what scientists are doing?
Every vista thread on /. lately looks like this:
I've never used Vista (maybe for 5 min at my parent's house), so I don't have my own opinion, but can we just admit that apparently SOME people have problems with it? I mean, sure some are probably exaggerating, and some are probably having driver issues (which I don't see any reason to ignore, actually), but are you really ready to claim that ALL the complaints are groundless just because YOU didn't have a problem? And what is a problem to one person may not be a problem to others. Someone could at least link some data to make their case: Here are some tests of XP vs Vista on the same hardware.
They're on to us!
My invention, "An Actual Torch" can set things on fire in even less time. It also has a much more disperse beam so it illuminates a wide area. The only drawback is it has a much shorter range. But then again on the plus side, it can't be accidentally used to destroy airplanes.
Interesting. In the U.S., I'm pretty sure that would be considered a "pyramid scheme" and therefore illegal. The people who start it may make a lot of money, but once there's no one left to recruit, a bunch of people just lose their starter kit money. The idea of it NOT being illegal is interesting. It raises the question of how much should a government do to protect it's citizens from their own foolishness.
Well, yes, I think I can. Once you devalue the victim, the result is the same. It doesn't matter whether you devalue them because they are "infidels" or because you think they're "holding back" society. Given that most of the world has believed some kind of religion for most of history, in sheer numbers I'm sure there's been more evil done in the name of religion than atheism. Probably both numbers are dwarfed by the amount of evil done for purely selfish motives, though (just watch the news!).
Thanks for an unusually intelligent (for a religious person) reply BTW.LOL ... I'll take that as a compliment. Actually, I get that a lot. I think it's because I try really hard to see things from the other side, and not get too emotional about it. A mentor once told me, "God doesn't need you to defend him." I think a lot of people get worked up when you criticize something dear to them, and getting worked up really limits your ability to sound intelligent.
NOT true! Yes, on-die cache is way faster than main memory, but for most applications, you're hitting the cache most of the time. I can't find any articles right now with numbers, but I know from looking at tests on the effect of cache size on performance that at some point you hit rapidly diminishing returns for cache size increases.
It's pretty analogous to main memory vs disk latency. If you don't have enough main memory, your system bogs down swapping to disk, but if you have enough memory that that doesn't happen, increasing the amount of memory beyond that won't make much of a difference.
I would say that parallelization is the next big thing(tm) in improving CPU performance. Clock speed seems to have hit a wall.