Re: "Burrito meets soft taco in alleged rooftop romp outrage"
Were they fish tacos? Inquiring minds want to know ...
2662 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2007
A quite significant amount of space has to be devoted to lines for carrying the clock signal. Instead of etching lines to carry this signal on the silicon, what about using radio emissions in selected bands to keep individual parts in sync with each other? In fact, why stop there? Tiny directional antennae would give near-perfect fanout and it might open up new parallel processing capabilities. Throw in a few diffraction gratings (created by etching regular logic areas on the silicon) and you could claim to have some quantum-level processing available too.
Of course, I know next to nothing about these things, so this idea is almost definitely a crock of shit.
Anyway, for the real reason I wanted to post: thumbs up for "scrying". Take that, spell-checker!
re: Guinness
There's a relativistic time dilation effect going on when you first order the pint and you're watching it settle and waiting for the barman to get around to topping up the head and serving it to you. No matter what the true length of time taken by this, it always seems longer. This effect always occurs in close temporal proximity to the act of Guinness flowing through the pipes, so it will naturally occur when it's coming out the other end, too (even in diluted/semi-metabolised form).
If mixing of two massive amounts of hot/cold air is the problem, then why not build big air ducts with pumping stations at appropriate locations? Obviously we can't expect to be able to mix huge weather fronts, but we might be able to "pre-mix" enough of it so that the larger twisters simply don't have a chance to develop.
As it is, if the solution is to build a wall, then surely it's just moving the problem somewhere else? Unless you build it long enough that the warm fronts will have dissipated by the time they get around, I guess...
Also, wasn't there a Russian who thought you could stop hurricanes by flying around them backwards?
They're free to steal my idea of a "power arbitration bus" that I mentioned in another thread about a year and a half ago.
(also: gating is cool. Just came across this idea when reading the broadcom docs for RPI GPU today)
Or all O/S's. My graphics card runs noticeably hotter when I boot to Linux than when I'm in Windows. So much so that I had to install an extra fan to keep the machine from freezing randomly (pretty sure the north bridge was failing because of extra heat rising off the graphics card into that general area). Of course, if AMD wanted to prioritise power savings, they could totally help out the guys making the free drivers by providing a patch (or sufficient documentation) to fix this.
Oh god yes, Jen is gorgeous. We need more of her on TV!
Was that her in half-horse-half-human guise in TV ads not so long ago? I guess some people might be into that, but I don't think it was one of her better roles.
has an interesting history. There are many web pages describing how, basically, you shouldn't treat it as being a proper security measure, like, ever. I know that things have moved on from naively trusting chroot, and Docker totally isn't just chroot in another guise, but still, I'm not at all surprised that there would be bugs like this in it... (mind you, bugs crop up in vm systems too, from time to time...)
It was probably usability that spurred the development of the first chroot systems, and I'm sure that a similar process took place around the development of containers. Let's hope they can focus on security a bit more to squelch bugs like this so that it doesn't just end up as chroot v2.0.
Adapteva is busy fulfilling its Parallella pre-order backlog. Zynq 7010 (for the most part) combining dual ARM A9 and FPGA, also coupled with their 16-core Epiphany chips (reg link here). Looks to be a pretty well-balanced system and consumes minimal amounts of power (relative to XEON, naturally).
I'm not sure what the combination of Xeon + FPGA is supposed to achieve, but that's mainly because I don't understand exactly what Intel intends users to offload to the FPGA when they've already got super-beefy cores in the Xeon part. Maybe they're targeting some sort of FPGA-driven interconnect fabric? Still, wouldn't XEON + ASIC be a much better pairing for that particular niche/application?
Otherwise, I just don't know. Customers might "dig" the reconfigurable bit, but FPGA just strikes me as being more of a stop-gap measure until the "real" peripherals can be built... maybe Intel just wants their users to do some R&D for them on the cheap.
is some kind of fridge Shiva (or Ganesh). The key point is lots of arms for holding things. This would know what things are approaching their use-by date and would thrust it out at you as soon as you open the door. If you're really slow about getting to use things, it could start banging on the inside of fridge door to attract your attention. You'd soon get used to this disconcerting noise and any guests you have over who become alarmed can have their fears assuaged with a simple: "ignore it; it's just the fridge Shiva."
You might be tempted to give the fridge Shiva some other tasks, such as scrambling eggs or mixing ingredients for a cake. However, this would clearly be sacrilegious and should not be attempted under any circumstances.
Unfortunately, the Internet has only 4 references to this, but with the aid of the appropriate Japanese chindogou (in this case, a ladder specifically designed for a spider to escape a slippery bath), the answer is "yes". (by themselves, the spider gloves, zey do nothing, though).
Let's say I have a dedicated server (or VPS?) somewhere that has IPv6:
* is it possible to set up a vpn (Linux-based) so that my local IPv6 traffic goes out over that link with a specific IPv6 address?
* would I be able to use the same tunnel and some config on the remote server to assign specific IPv6 addresses to, eg, my local toaster, fridge, etc.?
My local ISP doesn't support IPv6, so I'm trying to figure out how to dip my toe into IPv6 waters, so to speak...
Indeed. My point was, those were two examples where, for me, the money spent in trying to educate me on those topics was largely wasted.
I think I slightly misunderstood you, then. In the end, I think we both agree that not everyone will find formal teaching useful.
While not everyone will benefit from studying a particular subject, I think we should definitely looking to make sure that everyone at least has the option of studying these things (whether it be music, coding, woodwork, art, languages or whatever). In an ideal world, eh?
Many of my difficulties learning music have been due to it's totally moronic way of describing things: From notation, to note names, to scales, to time signatures there is not a single part which does not make a logical person tear there hair out with the fuckwittedness of it all.
I'm not totally sure about that. I didn't actually learn music in school (all I can remember is that we did singing and I vaguely remember some messing around with a recorder or tin whistle), so I taught myself about it later. Actually, pretty much my first intro to musical "theory" was from appendix E in the Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide. I must have had some other reference, too, as I discovered that each octave is double the frequency of the last one, and that each semitone is a fixed multiple of the last one too (the 12th root of 2, in fact).
Starting from that point, I found the whole topic much more accessible.
I do agree that notation is a problem, and no, I can't even sight-read very well or (quickly) figure out the scale from the key signature, or understand all time signatures, or even get my head around why A# isn't the same as B flat (the other commenter's explanation notwithstanding), or ...
I don't think that the notation for note lengths is too bad, though, since more "decoration" just means shorter notes. At least that's quite simple ...
Studying aspects of the culture was worthwhile, but not learning the language.
Ah, yes... I found the quote (and person who said it) that I was trying to remember to respond to your sentiment:
"To know another language is to live another life." -- T. G. Masaryk, President of the First Czechoslovak Republic
Who wouldn't want to live another life?
I'm sorry to say, but sheet music is really easy to figure (well, apart from key signatures, which require a knowledge of scales). The main problem lies in sight-reading, I think. Anyone can probably learn the notation in an afternoon, but it takes practice to be able to look at the pattern on the page and distinguish an E from an F, say, without resorting to reciting a mnemonic (like "every good boy ...") or having to mentally count from your "baseline".
Sheet music is also completely distinct and separate from actual music. Even if you don't know how to sight-read (or even decipher it in the slightest), you can still be good at music. Scott Joplin, for one, couldn't read sheet music ...
As for the utility of languages, I guess it depends on how far into it you get in the first place. If you don't apply yourself enough to get beyond a few tourist phrases, then sure, it's useless and you'd be better off waiting until you travel (or will travel) to a place before diving in (so you'll have some practical application of it). I think that any serious study does tend to pay you back for the effort, regardless of how practical it might be in general. I rarely use my Japanese, but I'm still very glad that I did study it, even if it's only to get a bit more enjoyment out of Japanese films or chatting to the occasional Japanese person I meet.
Music and Japanese might seem useless to you, but it's hardly a blanket statement you can apply to everyone. Coding is no doubt the same ...
My bet is that they've thrown in the towel with their "patent-free" vp6 (or whatever it's called) and decided that if they can't control the patents behind the codecs, they'll damned well be sure they make a play for being the #1 conduit to rival iTunes, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and all the other delivery guys. They don't have a media store for nothing...
putting the many eyeballs idea finally to rest
Does it? Bit of a tree falling in the forest scenario. Just because people could have been looking, doesn't mean they were. Still doesn't change the fundamental idea of "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" (though you may argue about the smarts behind the eyes, if you wish).
Reynolds is a boffin himself or ex-boffin
Indeed he is, and I've read some of his books.
I don't care much for the quality of proof-reading, though. For example:
* unmeasurably old -> immeasurably old
* eeking out its nuclear lifetime -> eking out ...
* Cities as mute as sphinxes -> sphinges (ok, I'm being picky)
Man, the quality of AIs they send into space these days ...
And if executed as root, "rm" is usually aliased to "/bin/rm -i", so there is a prompt for everything
Huh? What kind of namby-pamby, hand-holding, distro are you running?
Hint: always assume the safety's /off/ and think before you sudo, rm, dd or whatever. An alias for rm is suitable only for true nincompoops.
There's no point in buying it now
Well I'd make an offer if they'd accept it. True, I've got no money and no experience (apart from having a half dozen Raspberry Pis around the place and having experience with using mobile phones), but I'm sure that the team is well on top of things and if they'll have me, I'd gladly be their leader.
I doubt that this will happen, but it could weaken the power of big copyright lobby interests in pursuing sites that are merely indexing (or even just linking to) "infringing" content. In such cases, it's the user who's downloading the content, with the indexer just telling them how to access it. In both the arenas of patent and copyright law, we know who the real infringers are---the people who hold the copies and distribute them---so they should be the real target of litigation, and not the "finger pointers" (who tell you how the things work or how to find them) or the people who follow that direction.
Yeah, I know that patents and copyrights are completely different things, but I do think that the parallels are worth thinking about here. It could herald a radical shift towards sensible interpretation of "IP" ownership---if the judgement is allowed to stand, that is... Unfortunately, these things rarely follow "sensible" rules...
But it took a whole lot of energy and hydrocarbons to make and transport....
Well, if it's sitting(*) on a shelf, it still has some potential energy due to its elevation. If you were to drop it on your foot, say, you could convert that potential energy into kinetic energy.
The internet, on the other hand, where streaming videos reside, has no such store of potential energy because, as we all know, the Internet weighs nothing.
(* as an aside, why the hell do Brits say "is sat" on a shelf? what the hell kind of tense/conjugation is that?)
Never use averages as the source of your data. Anything which combines data has already lost important detail.
Oh, I don't know about that. While reading the first article in the series (and again, with the German tank problem) I was slightly disappointed not to see Little's Law listed. Now there's an interesting (and valid) application of averages...
The author mustn't have got the memo at Vulture Towers. I thought the current rule was "no Simpsons jokes, please – we're adults here..." [paragraph 3],
A case of two nations "divided by a common language?"
"The enjoyment of a common language was of course a supreme advantage in all British and American discussions," Churchill wrote in The Second World War. No interpreters were needed, for one thing, but there were "differences of expression, which in the early days led to an amusing incident." The British wanted to raise an urgent matter, he said, and told the Americans they wished to "table it" (that is, bring it to the table). But to the Americans, tabling something meant putting it aside. "A long and even acrimonious argument ensued," Churchill wrote, "before both parties realised that they were agreed on the merits and wanted the same thing."