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Comment Re:If there was a Bad at Math Map... (Score 5, Insightful) 1163

Fair enough. It was an incomplete pivot. In the debates he went right-of-Perry on immigration but wasn't more radical than most of the stage.

But, again, what can you do. You don't want to appear to be an Etch-a-Sketch, but you have to in a split-brained party if you want all their votes. Pleasing the corporations ruins the budgets valued by decent conservatives, pleasing the decent conservatives, irks the religeous zealots. The guy was asked to swim in air. I've no pity for the amount of deceit he employed in this process, but it looked like a pretty impossible job.

Submission + - Is there something wrong with the Adapteva Supercomputers? (kickstarter.com) 1

Art Popp writes: I need for a super computer to do some very branch-diverse AI experimentation for gaming AI development. I can't afford EC2 for an extended period. Caught up in the magic of GPU computing, I now have 5 CUDA books fully digested and an Nvidia 580GTX completely idle (except for Portal nights), and it turns out it's going to be nightmarishly tricky to bend a GPU to my needs because of the inherent dislike SIMD architectures have for this kind of code. I just came across the Parallella Kickstarter and backed it. The 64 individual cores, the non-SIMD layout, the decent memory throughput and the simple C programming interface make it sound pretty awesome, but CUDA was the wrong flavor of awesome for my needs. Is there a reason there aren't more backers for a $200 supercomputer? Or should I buy three?
Hardware

Submission + - Why Can't Industry Design an Affordable Hearing Aid? 1

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Tricia Romano writes in the NY Times that over the last 10 years, purchasing a hearing aid had become even more difficult and confusing than buying a new car — and almost as expensive. "I visited Hearx, the national chain where I had bought my previous aids. There, a fastidious young man spread out a brochure for my preferred brand, Siemens, and showed me three models. The cheapest, a Siemens Motion 300, started at $1,600. The top-of-the-line model was more than $2,000 — for one ear. I gasped." A hearing aid is basically just a microphone and amplifier in your ear so it isn’t clear why it costs thousands of dollars while other electronic equipment like cellphones, computers and televisions have gotten cheaper. Russ Apfel, an engineer who designed a technology now found in all hearing aids, says there is no good reason for the high prices. “The hearing aid industry uses every new thing, like digital or a new algorithm, to raise prices,” says Apfel. “The semiconductor industry traditionally reduces the cost of products by 10 to 15 percent a year,” he said, but “hearing aids go up 8 percent a year annually” and have for the last 20 years."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Windows 8 devices not exactly flying off the shelves (theinquirer.net) 1

girlmad writes: Doesn't sound like Microsoft’s Windows 8 has got off to a great start in the UK, with computer retailer Currys and PC World struggling to shift devices running the new software. The store on Oxford Street in London was yet to sell one device running Windows 8 by midday today. It seems that the hype created in the build-up to Microsoft's launch has already blown over.
Red Hat Software

Submission + - ARM, AMCC Team on Server (slashdot.org)

Nerval's Lobster writes: "Red Hat announced Oct. 25 that it had teamed up with both ARM and ARM licensee Applied Micro Circuits Corp. to develop a 64-bit server design based on the ARM architecture, a day after another ARM server partnership was struck.

ARM and AMCC said that they planned to develop a server that would be based on the AppliedMicro X-Gene “server on a chip” design. It wasn’t immediately clear if the two companies would be developing the server design themselves, or if they would need to partner with a third company.

For its part, Red Hat said that it was interested in the work, and planned to have a “Fedora 19 [Linux] remix” out in time for the 64-bit designs, expected later in 2014."

Businesses

Submission + - Irony Alert: Nigeria Increasingly Targeted by Cyber Criminals (cio.com)

Curseyoukhan writes: "Symantec says the land of countless bankers, princes and businessmen who all need your help accessing their funds, is becoming a huge target for cyber criminals. Apparently the Nigerians can't learn from their own actions: “The problem is that Nigeria does not really appreciate the magnitude of cybercrime and how it can derail an economy," says the Symantec's regional chief for Africa."
Transportation

Submission + - Sunseeker Team Building a Two-Passenger Solar-Powered Airplane (gizmag.com)

Zothecula writes: Piloted solar flight has been a reality for some time, with even international flights (as made by the Solar Impulse) now possible. Up to this point, such voyages have been a strictly solo affair, however the team originally responsible for the Sunseeker II intends to change this by manufacturing what’s billed as the world’s first two-seater solar aircraft – a motor glider named the Sunseeker Duo.

Comment When I'm designing a processor for Linux.... (Score 5, Interesting) 460

I spend some time designing things in Verilog and trying to read other people's source code at opencores.org, and I recall you did some work at Transmeta. For some time I've had a list of instructions that could be added to processsors that would be drastically speed up common functions, and SSE 4.2 includes some of my favorites, the dqword string comparision instructions. So...

What are your ideas for instrructions that you've always thought should be handled by the processor, but never seen implemented?

Hardware

Submission + - ARM Launches 2nd Generation Mali-T600 GPUs Promising 50% Performance Boost (ibtimes.co.uk)

DavidGilbert99 writes: "ARM has launched its second generation of mobile GPU designs hoping the new Mali-T600 series architecture will help boost penetration in the smartphone and tablet market.

Cambridge-based ARM Holdings says that the new generation of GPU designs will provide a "dramatically improved user experience for tablets, smartphones and smart-TVs" with each of the three new designs promising a 50 percent performance boost over the current generation of GPUs."

Comment Re:Willing to bet.. (Score 5, Insightful) 1706

It does. It also makes us more proficient defenders.

But the trick here is for us to stop being like our parents. Something bad happened and now the debate ensues as to which of our fundamental liberties we need to infringe to "make things better." The movie these people were seeing contained no shortage of innocent crowds of people being violently attacked.

One could have the knee-jerk reaction that the 1st Amendment has to go, that people shouldn't be allowed to make movies like this, under the premise that they inspire this behavior.

One could have the knee-jerk reaction that the 2nd Amendment has to go because the tools of self-defense can be abused to hurt people.

One could have the knee-jerk reaction that the 4th Amendment has to go because if the police had searched this guy's car at his last traffic ticket, they might have found incriminating content.

Just stop. These people have suffered a tragic loss, and people with empathy want to "do something" to make it better. But there are no quick fixes. The real fixes can only be tracked by the emotionally unsatisfying math that shows when you:

            Fund the existing background check system's connection to the mental health care system (under laws that already exist), you make it harder for crazy people to buy guns.

            Fund and fix education, you give young people options and opportunities to find things they are passionate about. It is from a large pool of hopeless, directionless youth that most violent criminals are drawn.

            These solutions work, and there are others. But they work slowly over time. The goal of a high-opportunity society is achieved with patience and dedication. They don't "feel" like they are working in any one individual's life, the coefficients of variation are simply too high on any individual person's experience. But they show quite clearly in the math. To advance, we need to be the people who measure, understand and improve. The next Enlightenment will be data driven.

Who would be better suited toward trusting the math and working the solution that computer geeks. This is our problem to solve.

Comment Buying Windows does some good in the world! (Score 5, Insightful) 451

Kidding aside.

She and her husband continue to show the best side of capitalism. For those that assume that wealth necessarily leads to avarice, it's delightful to me to see the Gates Foundation making that case more difficult to prove.

To hear her explain the contraception issue:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/415947/june-27-2012/melinda-gates

Comment It's not that hard. (Score 4, Informative) 351

Buy your router from this enormous list which covers a huge range of budgets:

http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start

Re-Flash it and be done with these folk. This newer firmware is much friendlier than the original OpenWrt you may have tried years back, and if you don't like what it's doing, you get a command prompt and make it do exactly what you want.

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