Posts by Vociferous 1921 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2013
He got richer without working by owning a lot of Microsoft stock, which rose dramatically when Ballmer was fired from the company.
(Ironically, Ballmer himself is also a large shareholder, and got almost a billion dollars richer because he was fired! Talk about "crying all the way to the bank"!)
192 CUDA cores is only impressive for a mobile device. nVidias own GTX 780 Ti has 2880 CUDA cores. All the talk of "supercomputing" and references to Tesla are pure marketing hype.
The thing is that the GTX 780 Ti draws 250 watts of power, which you're not going to sustain in a slab, while the Tegra K1 draws 5 watts of power and is destined to be in many a portable device, and possibly some car touch screens.
Archival paper is acid free, so in the right environment, meaning bone dry and cool + no insects, it should last indefinitely. I'm guessing the 500 years figure is empirical and should be prefaced with "at least": there are 500 year old books printed on paper still surviving, and the paper those books use is similar to present archival paper. The real problem is avoiding adverse conditions (fire, water, insects, idiots) for such a long time: only 31 of the Gutenberg bibles still survive.
Also, if all you want to do is leave a message for the far future, why not just etch it in quartz glass? That will last you the age of the universe, unless it encounters temperatures significantly in excess of 500 celsius.
"When a massive star explodes as a supernova and its remains collapse into a superdense neutron star, some of its mass is converted into gravitational binding energy that holds the dense star together. The Strong Equivalence Principle says that this binding energy will still react gravitationally as if it were mass. Virtually all alternatives to General Relativity hold that it will not."
General relativity holds that energy exerts gravity? Am I reading this correct?
> The theory that the earth is flat has been decisively disproven
No, it hasn't. How have you ruled out the possibility that all who sailed around the world didn't hallucinate? How do you know the entire world isn't lying to you? Ridiculously tiny possibilities yes, but nonzero.
Absolute disproof does not exist outside mathematics and theoretical physics, because all observations are to some degree subjective and all theories are ultimately based on at least one unevidenced assumption. This is philosophy of science 101, guys, seriously, look it up.
> ou're happy to 'believe' something based on no experimental evidence at all?
Sure, I am quite happy to believe in dinosaurs and the big bang, no problem. Neither have any experimental evidence whatsoever.
You're naively hung up on experiments, what you SHOULD care about is observations and what can be inferred from them.
> Scientists work in Sigmas
No, they don't.
@Mad Mike:
1) Outside mathematics and theoretical physics, no one knows what The Truth(tm) is. We can only know what our interpretation of the preponderance of evidence tells us.
2) "verifiable experimental proof" is not a magical bullet in any science which care about historical events. No astronomer can ever recreate the birth of a star, much less the big bang; no paleontologist can have a dinosaur fossilize in the lab. Finding the Higgs boson was important because there were several competing alternative theories, and evidence (such as finding something which fits the description of the Higgs) is how you select which one to believe in.
3) Everything in science is hypothesis, theory, or interpretation of observations. Contrary to popular myth theories (such as the Earth is flat, the Aether, the Geocentric world view or the alternatives to Higgs such as the Preon) weren't disproven, they were abandoned because more evidence supported the competing theory. That is, the consensus no longer favored them.
In Science it is always the consensus of experts which determines which theory is considered right. There is no other mechanism for doing so. Even something like quantum theory or that hereditary material is DNA, took decades to get accepted, to become the consensus view of the scientists in the field. And there's STILL scientists who disagree.
> In science consensus is irrelevant
That is actually completely wrong.
In every branch of science you have a couple of percent of kooks, people who believe weird things like that animals do not evolve, they just crossbreed (so a platypus literally IS a cross between a duck and a mole). That example is not a joke, there is a real biologist with a PhD and tenure who claims this.
The reason those kinds of view do not become dogma, is because the majority of scientists disagree. And the reason the consensus doesn't favor animal-crossing-guys theories, is that it doesn't jive with the evidence. The scientific position is determined by the consensus of the experts of the field.
The situation is exactly the same in climate science.
...is a 70's Commodore 796M pocket calculator. Gotta love those nixie tubes.
I am puzzled by the number of upvotes my post got. You guys do realize that I'm saying that this doesn't in any way contradict the observed fact of anthropogenic climate change? That the melt in Antarctica isn't due to "a simple and steady" ocean warming in the region is not just irrelevant but in fact expected, and in no way contradict anthropogenic climate change?
From the linked article abstract:
"Pine Island Glacier has thinned and accelerated over recent decades, significantly contributing to global sea-level rise. --- Oceanic melting decreased by 50% between January 2010 and 2012, with ocean conditions in 2012 partly attributable to atmospheric forcing associated with a strong La Niña event."
La Niña is a climatic cycle repeating roughly every five years, in which "the sea surface temperature across the equatorial Eastern Central Atlantic Ocean will be lower than normal by 3–5 °C."
That is, if you lower the sea temperature by 3–5 °C, then the melting of the West Antarctic shelf ice drops by about 50% (yes, it still melts). And if one look in the article, what they actually say is that the melting of the west antarctic shelf ice is more complex than just a simple and steady ocean warming in the region, that there are several factors influencing the melt. Which shouldn't really surprise anyone.
> Just a bunch of LSTs - Large Slow Targets.
I've been trying to imagine scenarios where a this suit would be a clear advantage, and the only thing I can come up with is urban combat, house-to-house, against lightly armed insurgents -- and even there this suit wont protect from the biggest problem, IED's.
Actually, come to think of it, I know where it'd be useful: for police doing riot control.
Here's how far they'd got this summer.
But it's a cool technology so I hope I'm wrong and they manage to pull it off.
> There is no Mars 1
Of course there isn't. This is never going to get off the ground. I think pretty much everyone understands that, but are applying on the off chance that they DO get off the ground.
I may get to see humans on Mars in my lifetime, but I doubt I'll get to see a permanent colony there. I hope I'm wrong, but it would really surprise me if the first Mars colony isn't 75-100 years in the future.
> There apparently hasn't been any research on the effect of low (such as Mars') gravity on the human body
Yes, because there's no way to do such research. Earth has 1G, space has zero G, to get anything else for long periods of time you need to go to another planet. That is one of the big questions wrt colonizing Mars: is 0.4G strong enough for permanent human residence? We wont know until someone's tried.
Incidentally, Luna's gravity is 0.4x that of Mars (1/17th of Earth's). In case anyone was thinking of settling there.
> I can't see why 200000 people would seriously apply, cutting yourself off from everything you know is a serious decision.
Yes, it is -- but I'd go. Not only might I be part of the making of history, real historybook stuff, but since average life expectancy is probably 20 years lower on Mars I might even cheat my genes out of the agonizing death by Alzheimer's they've got planned for me.
> the fact that no-one knows how to get people to Mars without killing them long before they get there. No spacecraft currently exists that could do the job and many of the technologies needed, like a way to sufficiently block space radiation
That is not true. The radiation from a round trip to Mars trip would be about equal to the lifetime radiation exposure allowed for NASA's astronauts, ie that astronaut would not be allowed to fly any more space missions -- but would still be completely survivable (I can't remember if that exposure translates to a 1% or a 5% increase in lifetime cancer risk).
A one-way trip would of course get half of that. See e.g. this article.
If, however, the astronauts were unlucky and there was a major solar eruption during their flight, THEN they might get lethal radiation levels, unless the ship had an shielded "safe room" they could hide in.
(EDIT: I've now checked, and the radiation exposure is a little less than half of that which is estimated to increase lifetime cancer risk by 5%.)
> Win8 needs a good virtual memory stress testing tool
If you think Firefox is a "good virtual memory stress testing tool" then you've almost certainly got problems with your Flash installation. It is in my experience ALWAYS Flash which is buggered when Firefox starts gobbling gigabytes.
> The original deafening silence from the EU...
...is because all western intelligence organizations are joined at the hip, and share information. Anything interesting the US finds out from it's snooping, it shares with it's pals, and of course the other way around. And the sum of all the organizations capabilities is much greater than any individual organizations capability. In short, the EU countries benefit from US snooping, particularly as the EU secret services generally may not spy on their own citizens.
That's not to say that they don't spy on each other or trust each other. For instance, the French repeatedly warned the USA that they were building the case for WMD's in Iraq on falsified evidence, but the USA ignored them.
Also, sometimes lines are crossed. The EU is fine with the US snooping on little people, but gets upset when the US snoops on, say, military contract bidding.
It just occurs to me that westerners know so little about the world outside the West that maybe many don't know what tactics the Russians used in Chechnya. Ten percent of the country's population was killed, and that was before Putin installed the war's worst war criminal as president, who is still to this day torturing and murdering with the full support of Russia.
> If the NSA was planning on actively undermining global confidence in american made, or american owned technology companies, they would probably have a strategy that looked a lot like what they're doing.
You do realize that you are really suggesting that Snowden's leak was a Chinese secret service operation, right?
> if I worked in the NSA this is exactly the kind of catalogue that I would "leak" to potential adversaries
Well, much, perhaps most, of it was actually known before Snowden leaked it (for instance that all cell phone calls and all international calls are automatically scanned). It just got a lot more attention through Snowden's leak.
True, an orchestrated leak would be mostly true things which were already known, with some sneaky false things hidden among the true, but I think that's giving the US spy agencies too much credit.
> The difference is Russia doesn't try to portray itself as the world police, the installer of freedom and democracy around the world
No, it's a fascist dictatorship without rule of law or freedom of expression, which shamelessly supports other genocidal dictatorships and tries to engulf surrounding countries, without even trying to pretend it's interested in freedom or democracy.
The US commitment to freedom and democracy may be charitably described as "selective" (as proven for instance by Syria), but even so it puts limits on what the US can do. For instance, the US couldn't use the same extremely harsh tactics in Iraq as Russia did in Chechnya to crush rebellion, because the US claimed to be trying to free the Iraqis.
The US may be like a drunk which falls off the wagon more often than not and lies to itself that it's just going take this one glass, but it's at least got the goal to sober up. Russia's and China's goal is to drink more than anyone else.
> still think the US government is the good guy
Well it's still less-worse than Russia and China. Cold comfort, I know.
> The worst part is it did so in less than two decades
Yes. I've said it before: it's both a mercy and a shame that so few Americans understand just how badly Bush damaged the USA. I'm even starting to think Bush may have mortally wounded the US empire.
Obama has improved things a little, but not nearly enough to win back any moral high ground, and if a progressive democrat president wont/can't reverse the damage, then who can?
I can't help but be a bit mystified that all anti-spam posts get downvoted, considering that everyone fucking hate spam. It's almost enough to wake my inner conspiracy theorist.
Also: I am very happy he disliked his minimum security prison enough to escape, because he will get caught, and he will get several months extension to his sentence. Fuck spammers.
> That's assuming a normal distribution
His error is much more fundamental than that: he's confusing measured amount of change (e.g. "the poll showed democrat support is up 1.5%...") with confidence interval ("...this change was statistically significant...") or possibly with margin of error ("...and well above the margin of error of 1%").
(And if someone wants to argue about the difference between confidence interval and statistical significance in my example, please insert an icicle in your orifice of choice.)
Here endeth the OT.
> But unlike Microsoft, Linux desktop users may be a dying breed.
The key issue is if desktop users of ALL OS's are dying breeds. Microsoft developed Win8 because they think the desktop is dying and wanted to accustom their users and developers to a mobile interface while there's still time.
The reason the industry thinks the desktop environment is dying is clear enough: PC sales are flat, mobile device sales increase exponentially, and technology has progressed to a point where stationary PCs are ridiculously overpowered for the vast majority of users needs (email, surfing, watching video).
Personally I think the analysis is partly wrong. PC sales are flagging not because they're being replaced by cellphones and tablets, but because PC is now a mature technology similar to a fridge or TV: because they're so overpowered, there is no need to replace them before they break. A five year old PC can do all you require of it, even play the newest games, so why replace it? Cellphones and tablets are immature technologies and still evolve rapidly, and so tend to be replaced yearly.
Unlike Canonical and Microsoft I don't think it's an either-or situation, I think in the future people will have BOTH a mobile device and a PC. You can't play demanding games on mobile devices, and it's a pain to create content (e.g. write texts, use spreadsheets) on mobile devices.
On an even more personal note I also think that the "PC flatlining" dynamic will be upset quite a bit by next-gen games and 3D headsets due to be released the next year, all of which can only be used on new PC:s.
Another interesting thing, which happened in 2012, was that Mint and Mageia bypassed Ubuntu as the most used Linux desktop distros, and Ubuntu became the only Linux distro a large part of the community actively dislikes.
The thing is that just like the interface previously known as Metro, Ubuntu's Unity interface sucks gigantic donkey balls on desktop, and for the exact same reasons: they're dumbed-down touch-centric interfaces which expect you to search for everything, and designed for cellphones and tablets, not to be easy to use with mouse and keyboard.
Both companies are intentionally throwing the desktop under the bus, motivated by the common wisdom that the PC is dying, and the future is cellphones and tablets.
Or I should say WERE intentionally throwing the desktop under the bus, Microsoft met its Waterloo with that strategy, currently they're trying to undo the damage and figure out a new way forward, and heads are rolling: not just Metro chief architect Sinofsky but even major shareholder and grand fromage Steve 'Monkeyboy' Ballmer himself are history.
The moral of this story is that it's not a good idea to flip off the core business which feeds you. And I'm not sure Canonical has really got this memo yet.
Despite all my years on the internets I honestly did not understand why anyone would want self-destructing photos. It took me way too long to understand that it's a service designed to let highschool girls post photos of their tits without risking that they get featured on some teen porn site.
> How long will that last with everyone streaming 1080p porn through it?
Well, depending on how they've done it, perhaps quite a long time... See the "Media Hint" plug-in for Firefox, it can handle the load of tens of thousands of europeans wanting access to all content available to US subscribers on sites like Hulu, Netflix and Youtube, because the content isn't streamed through the proxy server.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
